Wesleyan University
The Honors College
The Ambivalent Nature of Christianity: Reconfiguring
Black Identity in South Africa
by
Daniela Monous
Class of 2015
A thesis submitted to the
faculty of Wesleyan University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the
Degree of Bachelor of Arts
with Departmental Honors in Religion
Middletown, Connecticut
April, 2015
Table of Contents
Introduction…………………………………...……………………….…1
Chapter I: Blackness in the Christian Imagination..………………..……8
Patristic Metaphors of Blackness……………………………….………10
Sinful or Polluting Blackness……....…………………………….11
Hypersexual Blackness……………...…..…………...…………..14
Demonic Blackness…………….…..……………………………16
“Virtuous Blackness…………..…………………………............17
Blackness and the Hamitic Myth………………..………………19
Chapter II: Indigenizing Christianity…………...………………………23
Encounters between Missionaries and Africans in the early 19th
century………………….……………………………..…………30
Failure: The Case of the LMS to the Tswana………...………….34
Contesting Conversion Narratives on the Homestead:
The Case of the ABM in Natal……………………….………….36
Adapting Christianity:
The Case of utshwala and lobola in Natal………………...…….41
Indigenization:
The Case of Zionist African Independent Churches…………….47
Divine Healing….……………….………………………..50
Black Leadership………………………………..………..53
Global Identity………………………...………………….55
Conclusion…………………………………..…………………..58
Chapter III: Towards a Reconceptualization of Blackness….…...…….60
Apartheid Legislation/Culture:
Black Subordination and White Superordination….………….…62
Apartheid and the Dutch Reformed Church...……………….…..67
Black Consciousness: Who is Black?.....………………….....…..71
Reconfiguring Blackness……………………...……………....…74
De/Constructing God the Father……...………….….……..76
Jesus Christ: The Black Messiah?.........................................81
Engaging in Black Theological Praxis………….…….……86
Conclusion…………………………………………….……….….91
Bibliography………………………………………………………….….94
Acknowledgements
I would firstly like to thank my thesis advisor, Mary Jane Rubenstein,
for her diligence, patience, guidance, and editing. This thesis would
not have been completed without her help. Also a big thank you to my
readers, Eugene Klaaren and Elizabeth McAlister, the Religion
Department, and Richard Elphick.
I would also like to thank my family and friends who gave me support
and help with edits during the last part of this journey: my mother, my
sister, Mickey, Mariah, and Jacob. You were all a great support to me.
I appreciate and love you all so much.
Thank You.
Introduction The Royal Chronicler of Prince Henry of Portugal, Gomes Eanes de Azurara, was responsible for recording the moods and motivations of the Prince during late Medieval Christendom, from about 1440-­‐1470 CE.1 According to American theologian Willie James Jennings, “Zurara,” as Azurara was often called, wrote the accounts of Prince Henry’s successful conquests in Ceuta and Guinea, and these accounts “remain crucial narratives of a founding moment in Christendom’s colonialism.”2 In The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race, Jennings offers a close reading of Zurara’s Chronicle of the Deeds of Arms Involved in the Conquest of Guinea (1457).3 Among the most arresting scenes for Jennings is one characterized by “penitent prayer” on the part of the author. 4 The scene describes a ritual slave capture and auction on August 8th, 1444, of which Prince Henry was a participant. In the observation of families painfully separated during the auction process, Zurara write an emotional lamentation to God. The basis of this lamentation is Zurara’s recognition of the Africans’ humanity in relation to his own, noting that, they too are descendants of Adam.5 Zurara 1
Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race, (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2010), 16.
2
Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race, (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2010), 17.
23
Ibid, 17.
Willie
James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race, (New Haven:
4
Yale
Ibid,University
17.
Press, 2010), 17.
35
Ibid, 17.
17-18.
46
Zurara,
Ibid,
17.Chronicles of Guinea quoted in Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology
5
Ibid, 17-18.
1 writes: “it is not their religion but their humanity that maketh mine to weep in pity for their sufferings.”6 In this prayer, however, Zurara asks God not to free the slaves but rather “to ease his conscience and make the event unfolding in front of him morally palatable.”7 Perhaps a sign of God’s response, the chapter ends with Prince Henry’s successful conversion of the slaves apportioned to him during the auction. Presumably, the slaves’ conversion to Christianity mititgates, or even (spiritually) redeems their enslavement. According to Jennings, the purpose and culmination of this chapter in this sense “enacted as an order of salvation,”—that is, that “African captivity leads to African salvation and to black bodies showing the disciplining power of the faith.”8 Over a century later, a Jesuit priest named Alessandro Valignano (1539-­‐
1606) similarly attempts to capture the salvific potential of all native peoples “discovered” during the colonial encounter.9 Valignano was trying to assess the viability of Christian missions to colonized areas—in his case, Japan. Jennings claims, however, that the Jesuit priest was also enacting an ideology that would become “the most decisive and central distortion that exists in the church,” supersessionism. 10 According to Jennings, supersessionism is an effect that “begins with positioning Christian identity fully within European (white) 6
Zurara, Chronicles of Guinea quoted in Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology
and the Origins of Race, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 17.
7
Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race, (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2010), 18.
8
Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race, (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2010), 18.
9
Ibid, 31.
10
Ibid. 33.
2 identity and fully outside of the identities of” other religious traditions.11 The potential for salvation therefore becomes a matter of creating insiders and outsiders along racial lines: to become Christian is, in some sense, to become white. This thesis deals with the matter of insider (white European) and outsider (black African) with respect to a globalizing Christianity. Its primary case study will be the colonized and then white-­‐ruled nation of South Africa. It examines notions of blackness in early Christian literature that served to dehumanize black people, the various manners in which black people reclaim and reconfigure these concepts, and process by which they sought to make sense of their lives through indigenized Christian traditions, asserting their humanity and dignity in the face of, and in a sense by means of, the very forces that had dehumanized them. In other words, I start from a place where blackness and black bodies are being discussed by non-­‐black Christians, to a place where white and black Christians are vying for power to define and ascribe value to blackness, to a place where black voices are privileged in this previously oppressive discourse, because they have transformed the discourse itself. In order to set the scene for the missionary encounter in South Africa, Chapter I begins with a discussion of patristic and medieval conceptions of blackness, which are deeply influenced by Greco-­‐Roman understandings of white and black, light and dark. These composite conceptions then become the cultural molds that influence patristic, medieval, and early modern 11
Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race, (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2010), 18.
3 understanding of blackness and black bodies. In short, blackness in this literature is used to demarcate incorrect from correct understandings of Christian behavior. Blackness is understood to be sinful, hypersexual, and even demonic. In the midst of these negative images of blackness, there are a few instances in which black people appear as virtuous. These virtuous representations are, however, instances of exemplary Christian virtue in spite of blackness. For this reason, virtuous blackness comes to signify Christianity’s salvific capabilities, its capacity to redeem blackness. Therefore, as Jennings explains, Christian and black are juxtaposed—the one [conceptually] overcoming the other,” even before the colonial encounter.12 Finally, we will encounter medieval interpretations of the “Hamitic” curse. As a result of an ambiguously sexual sin, the descendants of Noah’s son Ham are cursed with intergenerational servitude, a condition that medieval authors believed was physically marked by blackness. In other words, this Hamitic myth and its subsequent interpretation provide an etiology of blackness that is as persistent as it is dubious. Taken all together, these historically layered messages create a “scale of existence, with white at one end and black on the other end.”13 This chapter then demonstrates how the Christian imagination cultivated these negatives metaphors even before the advent of colonialism. Ultimately, this thesis seeks to trace the indigenous-­‐Christian redefinition of blackness over against these oppressive, European-­‐Christian metaphors. At 12
Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race, (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2010), 31.
13
Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race, (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2010), 39.
4 the end of the 20th century, the term “black” will be reclaimed by the Black Consciousness Movement and Black Theology project, both of which were enabled in complicated ways by the Christian missions to South Africa. In order to address these movements’ reconfiguration of blackness, it is important to address the process of conversion in South Africa; in particular, to see how the conversion process treated blacks. Chapter II traces the colonial and missionary incursion into South Africa, and the complex negotiations between European Christians and would-­‐be converts. Against those scholars who claim that Christianity in Africa is simply a European imposition, this chapter analyzes the process by which converted Africans were engaged in a process of theological reasoning with special regard to their African identity. Titled, “Indigenizing Christianity,” this chapter claims that Christianity only fully entered black South African sphere once the Africans themselves were capable of constructing their own African identity. It will be on this basis that African Christians will ultimately reconfigure Christian theology in order to affirm and liberate blackness. Chapter III, titled, “Towards a Reconceptualization of Blackness,” brings us back to the dialectic of blackness discussed earlier in Chapter I. What Chapter II has demonstrated is that black South Africans transformed Christianity in order to reconcile their identities as both Christian and African. This indigenized Christianity allowed Black Theology to continue this process, and to move from indigenization to liberation. This chapter briefly outlines some of the legislation implemented by the apartheid government to circumscribe the lives of Blacks, 5 Coloureds, and Indians. It then moves to discuss the influence of the Black Consciousness Movement on Black Theology in South Africa, with special consideration given to Steve Biko’s positive, cross-­‐categorical definition of blackness. According to Biko, blackness based on the condition of oppression, rather than skin color alone, and recognizing this shared oppression was the first step toward liberation. In effect, apartheid had assigned value on a hierarchical scale based on skin color, so Biko decided to combat the whole system by asserting that everyone oppressed under apartheid was black. Furthermore, blackness, according to Biko, was also a mental state— a conscious refusal to conform to these oppressive regimesThis redefinition of blackness was an important step, as it responded to the descriptions of blackness describes in Chapter I. But the specific contributions of Christianity will be combatted by South African theologians who draw on Biko’s Black Consciousness, African-­‐
American liberation theology, and their own experiences as African Christians in order to reconfigure the humanity of blacks under apartheid. In particular, South African Black Theology critiques and reconstructs the persons of God the Father and Jesus Christ, in order to claim divine endorsement of their political agenda and to reconceptualize black humanity, made in the image of this reconceptualized God. This chapter ends with an exploration of how Black Theology subverts the narrative of mental slavery and political absolutism in order to advocate for black solidarity through corporate personality. Ultimately, these examples of Black Theology at work reflect the political agenda of its secular predecessor, Black Consciousness. 6 The underlying theme of this thesis is the ambivalence of Christianity in South Africa, especially with regards to black identity. Chapters I, II, and III are all examples that each reflect varying agendas of creating a dialectic of identity and power within the Christian tradition. In these chapters, we find a paradox of both the oppressor and the oppressed sharing the same Bible and faith. For example, during the advent of the colonial project in South Africa, African converts use their knowledge of the Christian faith in order to craft an African-­‐
Christian identity, despite missionary insistence on complete authority over the converted community’s practices. In the concluding chapter, we address one of the more contemporary implications of Black Theology. Why do we need to affirm and assert black dignity in places that have legally abolished pre-­‐existing forms of oppression? The conversation will then briefly turn to the social-­‐media based, intersectional movement Black Lives Matter. 7 Chapter I: Blackness in the Christian Imagination
To examine blackness in the history of Christian thought, one must begin with
Greco-Roman conceptions of sub-Saharan Africa and its inhabitants. According to
biblical scholar Gay L. Byron, Greco-Roman “geographical descriptions and
historical summaries about Ethiopia served more to stimulate the literary imagination
than to record actual events.”14 This imagination conjures images of Ethiopia as
geographically remote and uncivilized; even Homer and Herodotus describe the
location of “Ethiopia” as the end of the earth.15 Aristotle claimed that Ethiopians were
less intelligent than the Scythians (Eurasian nomads).16 In the Greco-Roman tradition,
Ethiopia and Ethiopians were generic terms used to indicate all places and persons in
Sub-Saharan Africa.17 These ambiguous definitions indicate Greek ignorance of the
African continent in general.
While little was known about what lay below North Africa, Greek writers, like
Aristotle, were aware that its inhabitants were “black,” and “woolly-haired.”18 In
regards to white (leukos) and black (melas), the Greeks used the “fluid paradigms” of
day and night to imagine the contrast between light and dark, whiteness and
blackness.19 In classical Greece, whiteness (leukos) “signaled well-being and good
luck.”20 For instance, “only in Olympia, the residence of the gods … [was] sunlight
14
Gay L. Byron, Symbolic Blackness and Ethnic Difference in Early Christian Literature (London:
Routeldge, 2002), 31.
15
Gay L. Byron, Symbolic Blackness and Ethnic Difference in Early Christian Literature (London:
Routeldge, 2002), 31.
16
Ibid, 33.
17
Robert Hood, Begrimed and Black: Christian Traditions on Blacks and Blackness (Minneapolis:
Fortress Press, 1994), 53.
18
Robert Hood, Begrimed and Black: Christian Traditions on Blacks and Blackness (Minneapolis:
Fortress Press, 1994), 30.
19
Ibid, 30.
20
Ibid, 31.
8 and brightness eternally present.” 21 By contrast, black (melas) “implied negative
qualities in the sense of sinister, dreadful, terrible, [and] unlucky.”22 Melas not only
described the Grecian underworld, the locus of dead human souls, but it “also
characterized a level below” the underworld, a black, primordial pit for “disobedient
dieties.” 23 These Greek associations of blackness with death, disobedience, and
misfortune, were then carried into the Latin world when Greece was incorporated into
the Roman territories, c. 140 BCE.24
As
“Hellenists devoted to Greece,” the Roman elite “assimilated Greek
ethnocentric beliefs about the rest of the world,” including beliefs about blackness.25
As we have seen in the cases of Homer and Herodotus, Ethiopia—eventually
“Africa”—was thought to be the southern-most part of the world.26 According to
Robert Hood, Roman authors believed that Africa’s hot climate caused its inhabitants
to be black, thus lacking highly regarded Roman qualities.27 In particular, black
Africans in the Roman imagination “had shrill voices, were bow-legged, had a blood
deficiency, and made poor soldiers.”28 Both Cicero and Pliny the Elder thought of
Africans were highly fertile, oversexed, and stupid.29 In short, Romans adopted and
21
Robert Hood, Begrimed and Black: Christian Traditions on Blacks and Blackness (Minneapolis:
Fortress Press, 1994), 33.
22
Robert Hood, Begrimed and Black: Christian Traditions on Blacks and Blackness (Minneapolis:
Fortress Press, 1994), 33.
23
Ibid, 34.
24
Carol G. Thomas Greece: A Short History of a Long Story, 7,000 BCE to the Present (Hoboken:
Wiley, 2014) http://wesleyan.eblib.com/patron/FullRecord.aspx?p=1770683 (accessed February 24,
2015), 92
25
Robert Hood, Begrimed and Black: Christian Traditions on Blacks and Blackness (Minneapolis:
Fortress Press, 1994), 39.
26
Robert Hood, Begrimed and Black: Christian Traditions on Blacks and Blackness (Minneapolis:
Fortress Press, 1994), 39.
27
Ibid, 39.
28
Ibid, 39.
29
Ibid, 40.
9 elaborated on Greek views concerning blackness, creating an overwhelmingly
negative aesthetic in regards to blackness and black people.
The growth and eventual establishment of Christianity within the Roman
Empire led early Christian authors to appropriate Greco-Roman understandings of
blackness. These etiologies and associations of color allowed such authors to mark
Christians as separate from and superior to non-Christians, and to mark particular
Christians as right-thinking and others as heretical. 30 While the color-symbolic
language used by early Christian authors “may not have signified anything pejorative
or prejudicial,” Byron argues, “they certainly implied some hierarchy on a descending
or ascending scale.” 31 In order to demonstrate the kind of rhetoric European
Christians were armed with once the colonial encounters began, this chapter will
construct an analysis of the polemical color-coded language in early Christianity.
Patristic Metaphors of Blackness
The establishment of Christianity in the Mediterranean world owes much of
its success to the theological and ecumenical reflection of the patristic period.32 The
patristic period is often classified as the “period from the closing of the New
Testament writings (c. 100) to the definitive Council of Chalcedon (451).”33 The most
important geographical locations of theological debate in this time were: Rome,
30
Gay L. Byron, Symbolic Blackness and Ethnic Difference in Early Christian Literature (London:
Routeldge, 2002), 22.
31
Robert Hood, Begrimed and Black: Christian Traditions on Blacks and Blackness (Minneapolis:
Fortress Press, 1994), 59.
32
Alister E. McGrath, Historical Theology: An Introduction to the History of Christian Thought
(Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998), 24.
33
Alister E. McGrath, Historical Theology: An Introduction to the History of Christian Thought
(Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998), 24.
10 Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, Cappadocia, and Western North Africa.34 In
Christianity, the patristic period was important as a means of clarifying Christian
identity within the Roman Empire and in relation to Judaism. It is therefore marked
by a proliferation of diverse apologetics, which is to say, “the reasoned defense and
justification of the Christian faith against its critics”—both “pagan” and Jewish.35 The
theologians whose lives and work rose to prominence during this period are
considered formative to almost all denominations and sects of the Christian
tradition.36 Their constructions of blackness were carried through the medieval era
into the early modern period, when Christianity would encounter actual black bodies,
beginning with the West African slave trade. It is to these patristic conceptions of
blackness that we now turn.
Sinful or Polluting Blackness
The church fathers of the patristic period overwhelmingly tended to equate
“sin with blackness and salvation with whiteness.”37 According to Byron, the ethnic
othering of “Blacks/blackness [in patristic sources] became an effective rhetorical
strategy for defining vices and sins among early Christian” communities.38 Blackness
defined the threat of sin because it was contrasted to the light and purity of God.
Additionally, because blackness represented the threat of any and all sins or vices
34
Alister E. McGrath, Historical Theology: An Introduction to the History of Christian Thought
(Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998), 21-22.
35
Alister E. McGrath, Historical Theology: An Introduction to the History of Christian Thought
(Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998), 24.
36
Ibid, 24.
37
Gay L. Byron, Symbolic Blackness and Ethnic Difference in Early Christian Literature (London:
Routeldge, 2002), 56.
38
Gay L. Byron, Symbolic Blackness and Ethnic Difference in Early Christian Literature (London:
Routeldge, 2002), 60.
11 within the Christian community, it assumed a valence of pollution: blackness might
spread.
The leaders of early Christian communities wanted to attack and publicize the
dangers of sin and vice in order to define identity and establish stability.39 They
therefore used blackness as a foil for Christian rectitude; blackness became an
ambiguous force of sin that threatened the moral strength of the community. In the
Epistle of Barnabas (c. 70-115 CE), for example, “the Black One” is a figure that
signals immorality within the community of early Christians.40 The author writes:
“therefore, we ought to pay attention in the last days… in order that the Black One
(ho melas) may not creep in among us.”41 According to Byron, “the Black One” is a
personification of the evil and sinful behavior in the community “that should be cut
off.”42 In the second chapter of the Epistle of Barnabas, the anonymous author writes,
“we ought to consider carefully, brothers and sister, our salvation, in order that the
Devil (ho poneros) may not gain a deceitful entry into us and hurl us away from our
life.” 43 The Devil and “the Black One” are both metaphysically dangerous and
physically ambiguous characters that threaten to enter the community and violate its
purity. The reader is led to understand these two figures as equals, even as
interchangeable, so that the Devil himself is anesthetized as black.
Granted, “the Black One” is not defined as a physical being; rather the figure
operates as an allegorical manifestation of all sins and vices. All necessary
39
Gay L. Byron, Symbolic Blackness and Ethnic Difference in Early Christian Literature (London:
Routeldge, 2002), 69.
40
Gay L. Byron, Symbolic Blackness and Ethnic Difference in Early Christian Literature (London:
Routeldge, 2002), 61.
41
Ibid, 60.
42
Ibid, 60.
43
Ibid, 61.
12 information about the “the Black One” is outlined as a list of sinful behaviors; the
way of “the Black One” is the “way of death that destroy[s] the soul.”44 The Epistle of
Barnabas lists a myriad of vices, ranging from pride and not giving alms to murder
and idolatry.45 All these behaviors are markers of “the Black One”, now understood
to be equivalent to the Devil, who “tries to subvert God’s creation by moving
humankind from Christ’s kingdom of light to his own kingdom of evil and
darkness.”46 According to Byron, the polemic against this allegorical figure “was not
intended to denounce actual Black persons within the community,” but rather was
against “vices and sins that threatened the weaker members of the community.”47
Nevertheless, this set of negative associations with “the Black One” would eventually
be associated with actual black persons during the colonial encounter.
The explicitly polluting presence of blackness is magnified in the works of
Saint Jerome (348-420 CE), who in his Homily 18 on Psalm 86, writes that before the
advent of Christ, “we were Ethiopians in our vices and sins… our sins had blackened
us.”48 In this “history” of salvation, Jerome further typecasts blackness (“Ethiopians”)
as a symbol of vice and sin. Again, such blackness was said to be metaphorical rather
than spiritual. Moral and spiritual offenses did not physically alter a person’s
appearance; rather they polluted the souls of the transgressors, which could be un-
44
Gay L. Byron, Symbolic Blackness and Ethnic Difference in Early Christian Literature (London:
Routeldge, 2002), 61.
45
Gay L. Byron, Symbolic Blackness and Ethnic Difference in Early Christian Literature (London:
Routeldge, 2002), 61.
46
Robert Hood, Begrimed and Black: Christian Traditions on Blacks and Blackness (Minneapolis:
Fortress Press, 1994), 76.
47
Robert Hood, Begrimed and Black: Christian Traditions on Blacks and Blackness (Minneapolis:
Fortress Press, 1994), 63.
48
Ibid, 55.
13 blackened through the rites of penance and confession.49 Before Christ, we were
black, writes Jerome, “but afterwards we heard the words: ‘Wash yourselves clean!’”
His conclusion: “We are Ethiopians, therefore, who have been transformed into
whiteness.” 50 In this manner, the reader is encouraged to undertake a spiritual
transformation from a state of blackened sin to one of whitened virtue. Reading
Jerome alongside the Epistle of Barnabas, we see that blackness threatens the
individual soul as well as the community at-large, “staining” it until proper penance is
made and whiteness is attained.
Hypersexual Blackness
One of the ways in which blackness was particularly polluting was through its
hypersexuality. Chastity was a necessary virtue in one’s cultivation of spiritual
integrity, therefore, blackness became mapped on to chastity’s antithesis,
hypersexuality. Patristic authors often hypersexualized blackness in allegorical
literature in order to emphasize the importance of cultivating ascetic virtues, such as
celibacy. Most often, the black figures of temptation in these texts are women. In
these texts, blackness becomes an interpretative site within monastic culture and a
marker of spiritual destruction.51
The construction of the (black) female body as polluting, dangerous, and even
non-human reveals the fathers’ pervasive association of women with sexual
immorality, and their fear of both. Indeed, for many monks, the mere thought or
49
Gay L. Byron, Symbolic Blackness and Ethnic Difference in Early Christian Literature (London:
Routeldge, 2002), 56.
50
Gay L. Byron, Symbolic Blackness and Ethnic Difference in Early Christian Literature (London:
Routeldge, 2002), 63.
51
Ibid, 78.
14 presence of a woman posed a threat to their ascetic practice. This threat was often
rendered in color-symbolic language. In the Sayings of the Desert Fathers, for
example, an ascetic travels the desert and is confronted with “the work of the Devil…
in the form of an Ethiopian woman.”52 The woman says, “‘I am she who appears
sweet in the hearts of men, but because of your obedience and your labor, God does
not permit me to seduce you, but I have let you know my foul odor.’”53 Even though
the ascetic is able to resist sexual temptation, he is unable to avoid the “foul odor.”
This personified sexual temptation reveals herself in sight (color) and in odor, two of
the senses engaged during a sexual act. The “Ethiopian” woman and monk do not
interact through tactile senses, which would irrevocably damage the monk’s spiritual
integrity; instead, she reaches him through vision and smell, senses that are harder to
control (but arguably less polluting) than touch or taste. The monk is victorious in his
trial against sexual immorality “by overcoming the seductive traps of the Ethiopian
woman.”54 However, her obscene odor lingers, signaling the persistent dangers of
sexual immorality.
Astonishingly, this is not the only story in which a monastic leader is
challenged with sexual immorality by a malodorous, black, and female figure. Saint
Pachomius wrote about a vision in which the Devil appeared to him as a seductive
black woman. Saint Pachomius drives the Devil away with a slap, but the smell
lingers on his hand for two years.55 In chapter 5 of the Historia Lausiaca, Palladius
52
Gay L. Byron, Symbolic Blackness and Ethnic Difference in Early Christian Literature (London:
Routeldge, 2002), 98.
53
Gay L. Byron, Symbolic Blackness and Ethnic Difference in Early Christian Literature (London:
Routeldge, 2002), 98.
54
Ibid, 102.
55
Robert Hood, Begrimed and Black: Christian Traditions on Blacks and Blackness (Minneapolis:
Fortress Press, 1994), 85.
15 writes about a demon taking the form of an “Ethiopian maiden” in order to seduce a
monk named Pachon. The monk is able to give “her a box on the ear,” causing her to
disappear.56 However, the physical contact between monk and demon again leaves an
“evil smell” on Pachon’s hand for two years.57 Like Saint Pachomius, Pachon is able
to elude temptation, but he is defiled and reminded of this incident for two years
thereafter. Representing black women as sexual threats with distinctly unappealing
characteristics allowed the monastic community to overcome sexual vice. The threat
of sexual immorality continues to linger long after it is overcome, like the odor that
haunts these two monks. Resisting all forms of sin was not one instance of spiritual
fortitude, but a continuing struggle towards virtue and away from evil.
Demonic Blackness
The descriptions of blackness as sinful, polluting, hypersexual, and
malodorous have served to construct blackness as demonic. According to Byron,
early Christian literature constructs black demons as projections of ethnic and
spiritual “others.” For Byron, these authors fashion demons as ethnic others precisely
by means of their blackness, which as we have seen are associated with (particularly
sexual) sin. Therefore, such demons remind us of “the importance of constant
spiritual warfare against the passions of the flesh.”58 Moreover, they signaled the
importance of guarding the Church against evil intruders. According to Robert Hood,
56
Robert Hood, Begrimed and Black: Christian Traditions on Blacks and Blackness (Minneapolis:
Fortress Press, 1994), 101.
57
Robert Hood, Begrimed and Black: Christian Traditions on Blacks and Blackness (Minneapolis:
Fortress Press, 1994), 101.
58
Gay L. Byron, Symbolic Blackness and Ethnic Difference in Early Christian Literature (London:
Routeldge, 2002), 93.
16 “during the patristic period, various anecdotes circulated that characterized the
Ethiopian as a demon or a devil bent on sabotaging Christian spirituality and
Christian liturgy.” 59 In these anecdotes, these anti-Christian saboteurs were
consistently figured as black.
In Vita Antonii, written by Bishop Athanasius of Alexandria in the mid-fourth
century, black demons are dramatic tropes for the temptation to sin.60 In chapter 5, a
demon tempts Antony by infiltrating his thoughts and directing them towards money,
property, and fame.61 Antony repels this temptation through prayer, but the demon
later returns in the form of a black boy.62 Although clearly a threat to the saint, this
demon is described as weak, treacherous, deceitful, pitiful, and fearful. And crucially,
the soul of this boy/demon/tempter is described as black.63
“Virtuous” Blackness
Up until this point, blackness has carried three insidious, interrelated
meanings in North African patristic literature. Blackness is revealed to be sinful,
polluting, sexually immoral, and even demonic. And yet, there are exceptions to these
overwhelmingly negative associations with blackness. Christian literature also
presents us with an idealized or virtuous blackness, which surprisingly combats the
powers of sin, darkness, and death.
59
Robert Hood, Begrimed and Black: Christian Traditions on Blacks and Blackness (Minneapolis:
Fortress Press, 1994), 85.
60
Gay L. Byron, Symbolic Blackness and Ethnic Difference in Early Christian Literature (London:
Routeldge, 2002), 85.
61
Gay L. Byron, Symbolic Blackness and Ethnic Difference in Early Christian Literature (London:
Routeldge, 2002), 88.
62
Ibid, 88.
63
Ibid, 88.
17 Blackness itself however never becomes virtuous. Rather, it can be altered to
attain a state of purity and holiness. Origen (c. 185-254), an important patristic writer
and Egyptian theologian, associated the Bride of Solomon with the Gentile church in
his Homilies on the Song of Songs.64 The passage reads: “I am black, but comely, O
ye daughters of Jerusalem, as the tents of Kedar, as the curtains of Solomon. Look not
upon me, because I am black, because the sun hath looked upon me.”65 Origen’s
exegesis of these verses reveal that although the Gentile church “is baseborn” because
of her non-Jewish heritage, her virtue lies in her openness to receiving the Gospel and
abandoning the false beliefs of her ancestors. 66 Furthermore, Origen deems her
blackness as accidental. It is her skin that has been darkened by the sun; her soul is
white and pure.67 Blackness is therefore selected in scripture to reveal the importance
of penance and faith, which in turn reveal the bride’s true inner beauty (and
whiteness). The black bride in Song of Solomon comes to represent the universal
saving nature of Christianity; as Jean Devisse explains, “even Ethiopians, provided
they get rid of their blackness by doing penance,” “[are] destined to salvation.”68
Virtuous black people in patristic sources exemplify Christian virtue in spite
of their skin color. The anonymous editor of the Apopthegmata partum, for example,
64
Alister E. McGrath, Historical Theology: An Introduction to the History of Christian Thought
(Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998), 25.
65
Song of Solomon 1:5-6, The Holy Bible: Old and New Testaments, King James Version (The
Floating Press, 2008).
66
Gay L. Byron, Symbolic Blackness and Ethnic Difference in Early Christian Literature (London:
Routeldge, 2002), 73.
67
Robert Hood, Begrimed and Black: Christian Traditions on Blacks and Blackness (Minneapolis:
Fortress Press, 1994), 81.
68
Jean Devisse, “Christians and Black,” in The Image of the Black in Western Art, Volume II part I, ed.
David Bindman and Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 240, n. 205.
18 describes a desert father named “Ethiopian Moses” as a model of virtue.69 As Byron
points out, however, Moses’ exemplary status “comes at the expense of [his] ethnic
and color difference.”70 For example, before his ordination in Scete (Egypt), Moses’
ascetic virtues were put to the test. He was publicly ridiculed, as the Fathers asked
one another: “Why has this Ethiopian come into our midst?”71 Moses kept silent, thus
reflecting “the spirit of long-suffering and patience… the essence of the spiritual life”
to the council. 72 Here, Moses must completely suppress his anger in order to convey
his humility. Furthermore, his public denigration demonstrates the virtues that were
the community’s standard for entry, namely, humility, self-denial, and steadfastness.
73
The examples of virtuous blackness in this chapter are used as foils to indicate
correct and incorrect Christian behavior in patristic literature.
Blackness and the Hamitic Myth
The main focus of this chapter thus far has been that of blackness in patristic
literature. We now move to early modern sources that rely heavily on Genesis 10 in
order to categorize the native inhabitants of the lands that colonialists “discovered”.
The “Hamitic myth” in the Book of Genesis tells the story of Noah’s youngest son
Ham, and of the curse on his progeny as a result of his sexual indiscretion. The
Hamitic myth in post-biblical Jewish literature explains the existence of black
Africans, and justifies their subsequent subjugation at the hands of Europeans. This
69
Gay L. Byron, Symbolic Blackness and Ethnic Difference in Early Christian Literature (London:
Routeldge, 2002), 115.
70
Gay L. Byron, Symbolic Blackness and Ethnic Difference in Early Christian Literature (London:
Routeldge, 2002), 117.
71
Ibid, 117.
72
Ibid, 117.
73
Ibid, 118.
19 section does not intend to substantiate or disprove the Hamitic myth; rather it intends
to bring to light the ways in which blackness was given space and meaning in the
Christian imagination.
Genesis 6 tells us that God was displeased with the state of affairs on earth.
Specifically, divine beings had come down from heaven and procreated with human
women, breeding a race of powerful monsters.74 According to the narrative, God saw
that humankind had become irreversibly immoral, and decided to flood the earth to
destroy all of humanity, except one righteous man (Noah) and his family.75 After the
flood, God blessed Noah’s family and promised to never inflict such a curse on the
earth and humankind again.76 Noah and his three sons, Shem, Japheth, and Ham,
were therefore destined to “fill the earth” in the post-flood earth.77 The subsequent
genealogy of each son is described in Genesis 10, and the line of Ham produces Cush,
Egypt, Put and Canaan.78
While each of Noah’s sons is blessed by God “to be fruitful and multiply” all
over the earth, descendants of Ham become cursed with intergenerational servitude as
a result of Ham’s sin.79
“Noah was the first tiller of the soil. He planted a vineyard; and he drank of
the wine, and became drunk, and lay uncovered in his tent. And Ham, the
father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brothers
outside. Then Shem and Japheth took a garment, laid it upon both their
shoulders, and walked backward and covered the nakedness of their father;
their faces were turned away, and they did not see their father’s nakedness.
When Noah awoke from his wine and knew what his youngest son had done
to him he said, ‘Cursed be Canaan; a slave of slaves shall he be to his
74
Genesis 6:4 (Revised Standard Version).
Genesis 6:8 (Revised Standard Version).
76
Genesis 8:21 (Revised Standard Version).
77
Genesis 9:1 (Revised Standard Version).
78
Genesis 10:6 (Revised Standard Version).
79
Genesis 9:1 (Revised Standard Version).
75
20 brothers.’ He also said, ‘Blessed by the Lord by God be Shem; and let Canaan
be his slave. God enlarge Japheth, and let him dwell in the tents of Shem; and
let Canaan be his slave.’”80
It is unclear what exactly Ham has done to his father. Ham “sees” his father’s
nakedness. According to biblical scholar Jennifer Knust, “uncovering nakedness
[was] a euphemism for illicit sexual activity.”81 In Leviticus, she notes, incest is
described as “uncover[ing] the nakedness” of a relative.82 By this logic, Ham could
have raped his father. But Leviticus also says, “you shall not uncover the nakedness
of your father’s wife; it is your father’s nakedness.”83 If this is the derived meaning of
“the nakedness of his father” in Genesis 10, then it could be that Ham raped his
mother, whose nakedness would be interchangeable with that of the husband who
owns her. If this is the case, Knust explains, “Canaan can be understood as Ham’s
progeny via his sexual liaison with this mother,” making the curse on Canaan (instead
of Ham) clearer.84 But there is yet another possibility: according to Louis Ginzberg’s
The Legends of the Jews (a compilation of stories about the Hebrew Patriarchs from
post-biblical Jewish literature), Ham’s “uncovering the nakedness of his father”
means that he castrated his father.85 In line with this reading, Knust explains that the
curse on Ham would make “Canaan and all his descendants into slaves rather than
80
Genesis 10:20-27 (Revised Standard Version)
Jennifer Wright Knust, Unprotected Texts: The Bible’s Surprising Contradictions about Sex and
Desire (New York: HarperOne, 2011), 129.
82
Jennifer Wright Knust, Unprotected Texts: The Bible’s Surprising Contradictions about Sex and
Desire (New York: HarperOne, 2011), 129.
83
Leviticus 18: 8 (Revised Standard Version).
84
Jennifer Wright Knust, Unprotected Texts: The Bible’s Surprising Contradictions about Sex and
Desire (New York: HarperOne, 2011), 130.
85
Louis Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews, Vol. 1, trans by Henrietta Szold (Philadelphia: Jewish
Publication Society, 1925), 169.
81
21 free men, who would [otherwise] be capable of passing on their property.”86 In short,
while the specificities of Ham’s transgression remain mysterious, the crime is clearly
sexual, and it validates an intergenerational state of servitude for all of Canaan’s
descendants.
The earliest sources that equates the Hamitic curse with physiognomic
blackness are the Palestinian and Babylonian Talmuds, dating from around the 4th and
6th century C.E., respectively.87 According to the Babylonian sources, cited in David
Goldenberg’s work The Curse of Ham, Ham was “punished in his skin,’” which is to
say the color of his skin was the result of his having violated his father.88 The
Palestinian Talmud goes into more specificity about this curse; “Ham went forth
[from his father’s tent] darkened/blackened.”89 According to these sources, then, Ham
and Canaan’s descendants become physically marked as a result of this ancient
curse—not just with blackness, but with its purportedly attending physiological traits.
According to Ginzberg, the cursed progeny of Canaan were said to have “misshapen
lips, because Ham spoke with his lips to his brothers about the unseemly condition of
his father”; they have “twisted curly hair,” because Ham turned to see Noah’s
nakedness, “and they go about naked;” because Ham did not respect his father’s
nakedness.90 Therefore the descendants of Ham are cursed not only in servitude, but
86
Jennifer Wright Knust, Unprotected Texts: The Bible’s Surprising Contradictions about Sex and
Desire (New York: HarperOne, 2011), 128-129.
87
Edith Sanders, ‘The Hamitic Hypothesis: Its Origin and Functions in Time Perspective,” in The
Journal of African History, Vol. 10, No. 4 (1969): 522, accessed March 3rd, 2015, doi:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/179896
88
David M. Goldenberg, The Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity, and
Islam (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 103.
89
David M. Goldenberg, The Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity, and
Islam (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 103.
90
Louis Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews, Vol. 1, trans by Henrietta Szold,(Philadelphia: Jewish
Publication Society, 1925), 169.
22 also in their visible, physical features. Noah also divided and allotted all parts of the
earth to his sons; Ham received the Southern portions of earth, whose climate was
“hot.”91 Therefore, Ham and his progeny are understood to be black Africans, all
under a congenital curse. The patristic associations of blackness with sin, sex and
Satan are reaffirmed, and even given biblical authority. Moreover, Ham’s sin is the
first instance of sin after the flood, an event meant to purge the earth of immorality
altogether. The “Hamitic myth” explains the etiology of blackness and of sin in a
supposedly perfect world, presenting modern Europeans with a set of negative
metaphors even before it encountered “black” bodies.
Using this biblical myth alongside later Christian work regarding blackness,
European colonial powers would be able to justify the enslavement and colonization
of African under “ancient”, biblical pretenses. At the same time, however, the process
of colonization produced indigenous black Christians who, as the next chapter will
show, accepted the Gospel only when they could do so on their own terms. In the
process, they began to take back the language that had demonized, enslaved, and
oppressed them for centuries.
91
London Charles, The Book of Jubilees, quoted from Louis Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews, Vol.
5, trans by Henrietta Szold (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1925), 169.
23 Chapter II: Indigenizing Christianity The Southern African landmass is located at the southern tip of Africa, with a
coastline spanning more than 2,500 kilometers from its western borders with Namibia
to its border with Mozambique on the Indian Ocean. The coastline is relatively thin
and most of the land in South Africa lies on a large, high plateau with a long
escarpment on the edges. The escarpment on the eastern side of South Africa reaches
peaks as high as eleven thousand feet, and is more commonly referred to as the
Drakensberg Mountain Range. Its location and unfavorable ocean currents on both
the Atlantic and Indian made access by sea virtually impossible until modern
technological advances of the last few centuries.92 At the end of the seventeenth
century, imperial Dutch and British forces began to colonize the area around Table
Bay in order to establish checkpoints in trade routes from Europe to Asia. The pre-colonial inhabitants of South Africa have been aggregated into three
main groups. The hunter-gathers, or San, the pastoralists, called Khoi Khoi, and the
Bantu-speaking mixed farmers, who used both arable agriculture and pastoralism.
While the Khoi and San people lived exclusively in the northwest and west regions of
South Africa, the Bantu-speaking mixed farmers were dispersed throughout the
central and eastern regions of modern South Africa.93 Historian Leonard Thompson
explains that in these communities, “social and political groups were clans… often
joined in loosely associated chiefdoms.”94 Chiefs and the clan heads were responsible
92
Leonard Thompson, A History of South Africa, 3rd edition (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2000), 3.
93
Leonard Thompson, A History of South Africa, 3rd edition (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2000), 10-12.
94
Ibid, 13-14.
24 for moving the groups from one location to another, and for defense against human
and animal threats.95 In 1652, the Dutch East India Company sent Jan Van Riebeeck, a colonial
administrator, to occupy Table Bay in order to establish a “refreshment station” for its
trading expeditions at the Cape of Good Hope. Refreshment stations allowed boats to
dock and gather supplies on trade routes from Europe to Asia. This was the first
European settlement within the borders of what would become the Republic of South
Africa. Although the Company did not intend for the base to be anymore than a
checkpoint for fleets from the Netherlands to Java, the colony quickly became a
complex, racially organized society.96 The process by which this transformation took
place changed the composition of the area almost instantly. The company released
some employees from their contracts and offered them land in order to produce grain
and vegetables to sell to the company at a fixed price. Most of these employees were
lower class Dutch, German, or French Huguenots. The company intermixed these
groups among one another in the colony, labeling them “free burghers.”97 When this
agricultural venture proved unsuccessful, the company began importing slaves from
Angola through the Portuguese slave trade. By 1658, the provisional settlement and
the colony had become slave-dependent. Within this new economy, the indigenous inhabitants of Table Bay (the Khoi
Khoi and San) were left with the choice between abandoning the area entirely or
working as servants for the Dutch. The burghers, although some managed to become
95
Leonard Thompson, A History of South Africa, 3rd edition (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2000), 3.
96
Leonard Thompson, A History of South Africa, 3rd edition (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2000), 33.
97
Ibid, 35.
25 wealthy traders, found their labor was replaced with slave labor, and “turned to the
self sufficient life of the trekboeren (literally, ‘wandering farmers’ but perhaps better
translated as ‘dispersed ranchers.’)” Eventually these trekboeren would give rise to
the modern Afrikaner population.98 These early forms of colonial infiltration of the
land and exploitation of inhabitants, as well as the interaction between colonial
power, settlers, and indigenous peoples established in the 17th century would go on to
characterize the relationship between these same groups until the 20th century, with
the genesis of apartheid.
The Dutch Reformed Church (DRC) was involved with the historical
processes in South Africa since the establishment of the Cape colony in 1652.99
Originating in the Netherlands, the church followed Boers migration into the South
African interior during the Great Trek (1830s), and established independent synods in
the Transvaal, the Orange Free State, and Natal.100 While these independent synods
flourished in the South African interior, the official DRC remained in the Cape, and
for all intents and purposes, this is where all official DRC theology and policy came
from until the 1930s.101
Before the arrival of the Dutch traders, Bantu-speaking mixed farmers
occupied most of the interior land between the Cape colony and the eastern coast.
Specific examples of such groups of the interior include the Tswana, the Xhosa, the
98
Encyclopedia Brittanica Online, s.v. “Boer,” accessed October 19th, 2014,
http://www.britannica.com/EBcheckedtopic/71276/Boer
99
Johann Kinghorn, “The Theology of Separate Equality: A Critical outline of the DRC’s Position on
Apartheid,” in Christianity Amidst Apartheid, ed. Martin Prozesky (New York: St. Martin’s Press,
1990), 57.
100
Johann Kinghorn, “The Theology of Separate Equality: A Critical outline of the DRC’s Position on
Apartheid,” in Christianity Amidst Apartheid, ed. Martin Prozesky (New York: St. Martin’s Press,
1990), 58.
101
Ibid, 58.
26 Zulu peoples, Basotho, and Pedi. They are termed mixed-farmers because women
worked in agriculture while men worked exclusively as pastoralists. Economically,
wealth was based on cattle. Politically, chiefdoms were governed and protected by a
single chief, whose position was hereditary or usurped during warfare, and whose
main allies and advisors were heads of powerful families. According to David
Chidester, the chief was responsible for “sustaining order—in its economic and
spiritual, social and cosmological aspects, since these were indivisible” in the precolonial South African worldview.102 The religious tradition of Bantu-speaking mixed farmers was focused on
ancestor veneration. In each of the local chiefdoms, there was a term for a supreme
being or god, but priests and lay-people were primarily concerned with performing
rituals for the deceased ancestors, who, unlike the supreme god, were “spiritually
present and active relatives of the [African] homestead.”103 Such rituals attempted to
gain favor from the ancestors for rain, healing, and fertility, but also served to
reinforce the political power of a new or existing chief. Religious rituals accompanied
all major life events such as birth, initiation, marriage, and death. Although there
were many differences among practices of ancestor veneration, scholars agree that
these basic elements characterized a diverse array of pre-colonial South African
religious and cultural practices.104 In the early nineteenth century, the African population was devastated by a
combination of widespread drought, settler and colonial expansion, diminished access
102
Jean and John Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution: Christianity, Colonialism and
Consciousness in South Africa, Volume 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 128.
103
David Chidester, Religions of South Africa (London: Routledge 1992), 3.
104
David Chidester, Religions of South Africa (London: Routledge 1992), 10.
27 to land, and inter-chiefdom warfare. This period is known as the Mfecane, which
literally means “the crushing.” Its catastrophic consequences of this period were
exacerbated by the continued influx of settlers from the Cape Colony, which the
British Empire had annexed in 1814.105 The burgher population, looking for land to
settle on and a way to distance itself politically from British authority, continued to
move away from the coastline and into the region’s interior. During and after the
Mfecane, warfare continued between settlers and the continually expanding British
government. The infiltration of British political power was also marked by an influx of
Protestant missionaries in the Cape and the interior. From the perspective of
indigenous South Africans, these missionaries initially served economic purposes:
African chiefdoms allowed the missionaries to trade European goods for access to
land and cattle, and to teach some Dutch to some Africans to advance the chief’s
diplomatic agenda. 106 From the perspective of the missionaries, of course, their
purpose was to spread the Christian gospel; for them, trading and teaching were
instrumental to evangelization. And although they tolerated the missionaries for
economic purposes, the chiefs were very much aware of their missionary agenda.
Chief Mothibi of the Tlhaping was especially disdainful of the missionaries, claiming,
“that his people had no time for their instructions…Besides, the things which these
people teach are contrary to all [the Tswana] customs. ”107 Initially, the severity of
105
Leonard Thompson, A History of South Africa, 3rd edition (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2000), 52.
106
Jean and John Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution: Christianity, Colonialism and
Consciousness in South Africa, Volume 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 178.
107
Jean and John Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution: Christianity, Colonialism and
Consciousness in South Africa, Volume 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 178.
28 this contrast led indigenous Southern Africans to reject Christianity entirely.
Throughout the 19th century, however, as Christianity and mission stations became
politically and geographically ubiquitous, South Africans began to think that
Christianity might actually serve their political, economic, social and existential
needs. This chapter will examine case studies in Southern Africa in order to assess
the contexts in which white missionaries eventually converted indigenous South
Africans, as well as the process by which Africans gradually incorporated Christianity
into existing worldviews, determined to reconcile their African and Christian
identities. Specifically, this chapter will focus on the ways in which Africans were
active participants in a network of semantics, symbols, and conversion. While the
term “conversion” tends to indicate a complete rejection of one worldview in favor of
another, this chapter is interested in how Christianity was actively appropriated by
indigenous agents to become especially relevant to African life under colonial rule.
In short, this chapter will claim that the process of conversion in South Africa
transformed not only “Africanness,” but also Christianity. Such a transformation can
be seen clearly in the emergence of African Initiated (or Independent) Churches,
addressed in the chapter’s last section. As indigenous forms of Christianity, the AICs
are a powerful site of South African agency in the midst of colonialism; in the 20th
century, in fact, they will become tools of political resistance against segregation and
apartheid legislation. This discussion of the AICs will therefore set the stage for the
final chapter’s focus on South African Black Theology. 29 Encounters between Missionaries and Africans in the early 19th century Jean and John Comaroff’s Of Revelation and Revolution is a historical
anthropology of missionary interactions with a Tswana chiefdom, ruled by Chief
Mothibi, from 1820 onwards. The Tswana are a mixed-farming Bantu-speaking
group, located in the South African Highveld, the region of the inland plateau under
the Limpopo River. This land lies far from the eastern boundaries of the Cape Colony
and was very difficult to reach via ox and wagon, the main method of transportation
used by missionaries. The missionaries who overcame these difficulties in order to
minister to the Tswana were members of the London Missionary Society (LMS), a
“Nonconformist” group, meaning they were unaffiliated with the Church of England. The main claim of the Comaroffs’ study is that the missionaries of the London
Missionary Society were “driven by the explicit aim of reconstructing the ‘native’
world in the name of God and European civilization,” a process the Comaroffs call
“colonizing consciousness.”108 The term reflects a deep criticism of the missionizing
process; as the introduction claims, “whether it be in the name of a ‘benign,’
civilizing imperialism or in cynical pursuit of their labor power, the final objective of
generations of colonizers has been to colonize their consciousness with the axioms
and aesthetics of an alien culture.”109 For the Comaroffs, therefore, the colonization
of the Tswana consciousness was not a project of salvation, but of creating compliant
British subjects. While the LMS was technically unaffiliated with the Church of
England, the Comaroffs argue that the main purpose of the mission was to “establish
108
Jean and John Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution: Christianity, Colonialism and
Consciousness in South Africa, Volume 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 6.
109
Jean and John Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution: Christianity, Colonialism and
Consciousness in South Africa, Volume 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 4.
30 itself at the heart of the indigenous social order” in order to “spread the ‘kernel’ of
knowledge and truth, and work profound, civilizing transformations” for the eventual
management by the British Empire. 110 Ultimately, the Comaroffs claim, this
colonization of indigenous consciousness—of which the missionary project was a
significant part—paved the way for a culture of complicity and domination in modern
South Africa that would culminate in apartheid.111 Invoking Antonio Gramsci, the Comaroffs define culture as “the shared
repertoire of practices, symbols, and meanings from which hegemonic forms are
cast—and, by extension, resisted.”112 By hegemony, Gramsci means “that order of
signs and practices, relations and distinctions, images and epistemologies… that come
to be taken for granted as the natural and received shape of the world and everything
that inhabits it.”113 In particular, hegemonic culture comes to assume “cultural, moral,
and ideological leadership” over other groups.114 Therefore, the Comaroffs elucidate
that the European colonizing of Tswana consciousness was a project of imposing a
repertoire of naturalized, unquestioned, yet distinctly European and Christian symbols
and practices upon indigenous South Africans, and of making this repertoire the
standard for “understanding”—which is to say reconstructing—indigenous life. The Comaroffs argue that the Nonconformists’ Euro-Christian worldviews
brought by the Nonconformists quickly came to dominate indigenous forms of
meaning, as missionaries convinced Africans of Christianity’s “superior truths” and
110
Jean and John Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution: Christianity, Colonialism and
Consciousness in South Africa, Volume 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 200.
111
Jean and John Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution: Christianity, Colonialism and
Consciousness in South Africa, Volume 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 6.
112
Ibid, 21.
113
Ibid, 23.
114
David Forgacs, An Antonio Gramsci Reader: selected writings, 1916-1935 (New York: Schocken
Books, 1988), 423.
31 even earned “their voluntary compliance” in the conversion process.115 According to
the Comaroffs, this compliance was primarily achieved by means of the European
classification of Setswana (Tswana language), and the subsequent rendering of
English prayer books, hymnals, and eventually the Bible, into this manufactured
idiom. In other words, the Protestant missionaries who claimed to be preaching the
gospel of salvation were colonizing the consciousness of the Tswana through a
process of translation. In 1821, one missionary of the London Missionary Society (LMS) named
Robert Moffat traveled to the interior with colonial approval to missionize among the
Tswana.116 One of Moffatt’s main evangelical strategies in conveying the Christian
gospel to the Tswana was to translate the entire Bible into Setswana. Although native
speakers had codified neither Setswana language nor its various dialects, the
missionaries were keen to impose Indo-European linguistic categories upon it.117 Of
course, the missionaries experienced great difficulty in attempting to organize
Sestwana, since they tended to ignore the “subtle semantic distinctions” in the
indigenous language. 118 For example, the “Tswana [had] long explained their
reluctance to say the term shupa (‘seven’) by observing that it also means ‘to point
out’… [, which was] a gesture which connotes ‘to curse’.” 119 Nonetheless, the
Methodist missionaries eventually devised their own orthography of Setswana
115
Jean and John Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution: Christianity, Colonialism and
Consciousness in South Africa, Volume 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 179.
116
Jean and John Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution: Christianity, Colonialism and
Consciousness in South Africa, Volume 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 46.
117
Ibid, 222.
118
Ibid, 222
119
Ibid, 227.
32 language and Moffat’s subsequently translated Sestwana Bible (1830) became an icon
of Christian civilization in the South African interior.120 While the Comaroff’s study is both historically and anthropologically
invaluable, I argue that its excoriation of the conversion process places excessive
agency on the Nonconformist missionaries. The Comaroff’s reduction of mission
work to “colonizing consciousness” makes it seem as if indigenous people played no
role in the process. And yet, as the Comaroffs know well, the process of translation
required the cooperation and ingenuity of indigenous African linguists. At first, the
topics of discussion between indigenous subjects and missionaries had very little to
do with doctrine or evangelism; rather, they talked about rain, control over water, and
the location of the mission station.121 These mundane decisions and ideas laid the
groundwork for the eventual translation of the Bible and other Christian texts into the
vernacular. In the meantime, however, African agents were unwilling to become
compliant Christians (or British subjects); they only adopted Christianity once they
had altered it to fit their indigenous worldview. The relationship between Christianity and indigenous Southern African
groups can be divided into four stages: missionary failure, indigenous resistance and
contestation; cultural transformation; and finally, indigenization. In short, while
Christianity was brought to Southern Africa to be imposed upon the indigenous
inhabitants, Africans were resistant to conversion until they had fully transformed the
Christian message to suit their cultural and existential needs. 120
Jean and John Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution: Christianity, Colonialism and
Consciousness in South Africa, Volume 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 223.
121
Jean and John Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution: Christianity, Colonialism and
Consciousness in South Africa, Volume 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 207-208.
33 Failure: The Case of the LMS to the Tswana While the vernacular was important to relaying the message of Christianity,
convincing the Tswana that their traditions were false and Christian ones true proved
to be both difficult and initially unsuccessful. The maintenance of an African polity,
headed by the chief, also added another layer of resistance between missionaries and
their potential converts. Therefore, the colonization of Tswana consciousness did not
occur, as claimed by the Comaroffs. The failures of the LMS station among the
Tswana point to African resistance of Christian forms and narratives. Chief Mothibi allowed the mission station to be situated “some thirty miles to
the southwest” from the center of the African polity.122 The distance from the motse
(town) indicates the chief’s suspicion regarding the missionary agenda. The term
motse does not just imply the physical boundaries of the polity; it also “connoted a
‘nucleus’, the epicenter of the surrounding world.”123 In keeping the mission away
from the motse, Mothibi was trying to keep his world intact; according to the
Comaroffs, he and his advisors believed “that the very day they [gave] their consent
to receive the gospel they [would also] give up their political authority” and all
indigenous social and economic systems.124 That having been said, Mothibi did allow
a mission station to be built on the outskirts of town, demonstrating that he
understood its usefulness in terms of trade.125 Therefore the Africans and missionaries
had competing ideas about the central purpose of the mission station. 122
Jean and John Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution: Christianity, Colonialism and
Consciousness in South Africa, Volume 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 201.
123
Jean and John Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution: Christianity, Colonialism and
Consciousness in South Africa, Volume 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 130.
124
Ibid, 179.
125
Ibid, 179.
34 To be sure, it was clear to the Tswana that the missionaries thought their
purpose was to convince the Africans of the truth of the Christian message and the
falsities of indigenous practice. Nevertheless, the Tswana steadfastly resisted such
claims. For example, when missionary David Livingstone attempted to convince a
rain doctor that it was not his medicines but God who made rain, the rain doctor
replied, “God told us differently… God has given us one little thing, which you know
nothing of. He has given us the knowledge of certain medicines by which we can
make rain. We do not despise those things which you possess, though we are ignorant
of them.”126 In this conversation, the Tswana rain doctor is willing to accept the fact
that the Christian deity gave certain instructions to the British. However, the existence
of the Christian God and whatever instructions he gave to the British did not nullify
the validity of Tswana rain-making practices. This conversation indicates Tswana
confusion with the missionaries’ conviction that only the tradition of Protestant
Christianity was correct and free from critique. Africans were also aware of how
other indigenous forms of social unity had been completely destroyed by colonial and
missionary forces, as they had among the Khoi San in the Cape. The struggle to
maintain political and social autonomy in their traditional forms fueled their
resistance to Christianity, which they understood to be the primary marker by which
Europeans identified themselves.127 The mission station among the Tswana was not the only one that failed in
securing a large number of converts. Two mission stations in Natal, gained merely
126
Jean and John Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution: Christianity, Colonialism and
Consciousness in South Africa, Volume 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 210.
127
David Chidester, Religions of South Africa (London: Routledge 1992), 28.
35 two hundred indigenous converts after twenty years.128 The mission outposts to the
Ndebele under Chief Mzilikazi and the Zulu under Dingan, were both short-lived and
unsuccessful.129 The Africans who did take refuge in mission stations were for the
most part people on the margins of society: outcasts, women fleeing marriage,
political refugees, and accused witches.130 For example, of the 177 people living on
the mission in Natal between 1836 and 1885, thirty-three percent were seeking refuge
from their homes, while twenty six percent were on the station for temporary
employment prospects, such as working as a domestic or farmhand.131 Therefore, the
process of colonizing indigenous consciousness failed in its effort to create British
imperial subjects because most Africans were still very much involved in the social,
political, economic, and religious institutions of indigenous life. When they did, in
fact, reside on mission stations, it was because they needed work or could no longer
live at home—not because their minds had been won over by Christians.132 Contesting Conversion Narratives on the Homestead: The Case of the ABM in Natal As previously mentioned, the failures of the LMS among the Tswana were not
one isolated event of indigenous resistance to European and Christian hegemony.
During the middle of the 19th century, American missionary organizations, like the
128
Robert J. Houle, Making African Christianity: Africans Reimagining Their Faiths in Colonial South
Africa (Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press, 2011), 14.
129
Robert J. Houle, Making African Christianity: Africans Reimagining Their Faiths in Colonial South
Africa (Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press, 2011), 7.
130
Richard Elphick, The Equality of Believers: Protestant Missionaries and the Racial Politics of
South Africa (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012), 30.
131
Norman Etherington, “Kingdoms of This World and the Next: Christian Beginnings among Zulu
and Swazi,” in Christianity in South Africa, ed. Richard Elphick and Rodney Davenport (Berkeley:
University of California Press: 1997), 98.
132
Norman Etherington, “Kingdoms of This World and the Next: Christian Beginnings among Zulu
and Swazi,” in Christianity in South Africa, ed. Richard Elphick and Rodney Davenport (Berkeley:
University of California Press: 1997), 98.
36 American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABM), sent half a dozen of
its members into Natal to mission to the Zulu. However these stations also reached
relatively low success in their first few decades of working in Natal because Africans
came to the mission stations largely for short-term employment opportunities. The few conversions that did occur in this period tended to follow one of two
major narratives: one economic, the other social. African adolescents were sent by
their parents to work for missionaries in exchange for cattle or money. These youths
were often taught basic literacy skills, history, arithmetic, and, of course, the
Christian message.133 While most teenagers went back home with skills to procure
better paying and less labor-intensive work in urban areas or at the mines, a select few
stayed to continue to work on the mission as converted Christians.134 The social
conversion narrative involved Africans escaping their social obligations of homestead
life. Fleeing from social bondage, women in particular arrived on mission stations in
order to flee their marriages, family, and accusations of sorcery.
This second
conversion narrative, particularly for women, tended to be dramatic, as the “dominant
trope in mission correspondence” emphasized women escaping forced marriages and
polygamy.135 These were the most common reasons for taking up residence on a
mission station. These conversion narratives indicate that young Africans were aware
of how the mission station could be used to improve their economic and social
situations.136 133
Robert J. Houle, Making African Christianity: Africans Reimagining Their Faiths in Colonial South
Africa Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press, 2011), 7.
134
Robert J. Houle, Making African Christianity: Africans Reimagining Their Faiths in Colonial South
Africa Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press, 2011), 7.
135
Ibid, 16.
136
Ibid, 17.
37 These individual converts notwithstanding, the larger indigenous community
resisted the conversion of its community members because it disrupted traditional
African society. Each convert occupied a “liminal status” in regard to the traditional
African polity, and represented new gaps in the indigenous social chain.137 The
implications of the converted status of men and women will be discussed separately
because they occupied important but separate sectors of indigenous society. The conversion and loss of African males damaged the socio-political fabric
of indigenous life. Politically, converts lost their Zulu citizenship “from the moment
they took up residence at a mission.”138 Bereft of these legal protections, the kholwa,
the Zulu word for converts, could not farm or safely live on land outside of the
mission station.139 Socially, if one’s brother converted, this Christian sibling would
refuse “his responsibility to marry one’s widowed wives (and thus ensure the
wellbeing of both the women and their children)” because of the restrictions against
polygamy.140 Moreover, men were the political representatives of their families. In
the homesteads, men created life-long “strategic alliances built up along generational
lines.” 141 Therefore, existing and potential sociopolitical relationships in the
homestead suffered irreparable damage as a result of conversion. 137
Robert J. Houle, Making African Christianity: Africans Reimagining Their Faiths in Colonial South
Africa Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press, 2011), 72.
138
Norman Etherington, “Kingdoms of This World and the Next: Christian Beginnings among Zulu
and Swazi,” in Christianity in South Africa, ed. Richard Elphick and Rodney Davenport (Berkeley:
University of California Press: 1997), 97.
139
Norman Etherington, “Kingdoms of This World and the Next: Christian Beginnings among Zulu
and Swazi,” in Christianity in South Africa, ed. Richard Elphick and Rodney Davenport (Berkeley:
University of California Press: 1997), 97.
140
Robert J. Houle, Making African Christianity: Africans Reimagining Their Faiths in Colonial South
Africa (Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press, 2011), 72.
141
Robert J. Houle, Making African Christianity: Africans Reimagining Their Faiths in Colonial South
Africa (Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press, 2011), 72.
38 The strict agnatic structure of African society necessitated male control over
female productive and reproductive powers on the homestead. Therefore, any losses
of woman on the homestead “created reverberations felt by all.”142 Women escaping
unwanted marriages invalidated the social bonds created by two families during an
engagement. Additionally, losing a woman to the mission station represented a
significant loss of agricultural production on the homestead. Women on mission
stations were isolated from their traditional roles as agricultural producers. Converted
men were given ox and plow with which to farm, and “increasingly took possession
of both the fields and what they produced.”143 The conversion of African women was
therefore also economically transformative because converted women lost their
ability to produce goods for the family. The indigenous community that remained unconverted initially resisted and
lashed out toward their kholwa family members. The unconverted community often
saw conversion “as choosing a lesser way of life.”144 Families often reacted angrily
when confronted with the news of their child’s conversion. For example, one father
forcibly took his daughter home from the mission station, “made her remove her
Western dress, put on traditional skins, forbade her to read books, and required her to
drink medicine designed to cleanse her of the ‘sickness’ of Christianity.”145 Parents
also responded to the kholwa’s “perceived irresponsibility [to the obligations of
traditional life] by cutting off such wayward children from their inheritance.”146
142
Robert J. Houle, Making African Christianity: Africans Reimagining Their Faiths in Colonial South
Africa Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press, 2011), 72.
143
Robert J. Houle, Making African Christianity: Africans Reimagining Their Faiths in Colonial South
Africa (Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press, 2011), 63.
144
Ibid, 28.
145
Ibid, 27.
146
Ibid, 28.
39 Families who responded to conversion by cutting off their children economically
might have been acting in anger. More importantly, these families were challenging
the sincerity of their children’s conversion by forcing them to procure the means to
build their own homes and families on the mission station. This familial-economic
retribution against converts reflects, in a small way, the damage that conversion did to
the homesteads. Forced to build new lives apart from their unconverted families, converts
tended to do so in opposition to traditional African social norms.147 To distinguish
themselves from their traditional communities, converts sought to acquire European
items, clothing, and education. They did not, however, reject traditional forms
completely. Converts recognized that they were not European Christians, but rather
African Christians. They therefore actively sought to reconcile Africanness and
Christianity, using scripture and doctrine to reject some indigenous cultural forms
while also validating others. In addition to making sense of their own lives, converts
sought to lead unconverted African communities to Christianity by example. They
therefore endeavored to make Christianity relevant to traditional African life and
culture, and ended up reshaping both Africanness and Christianity.148 147
Robert J. Houle, Making African Christianity: Africans Reimagining Their Faiths in Colonial South
Africa Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press, 2011), 44.
148
Robert J. Houle, Making African Christianity: Africans Reimagining Their Faiths in Colonial South
Africa (Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press, 2011), 101.
40 Adapting Christianity: The Case of utshwala and lobola in Natal In order to examine the process by which South Africans indigenized
Christianity, we will turn to the example of American missions in Natal, where Zulu
Christians constructed their identities as converts in order to reconcile being Zulu and
Christian. Early converts worked as farmers on mission land and debated the
theological implications of their indigenous cultural practices in a Christian context.
While missionaries intransigently opposed practices such as polygamy and ancestor
veneration, the practices of lobola (bride price) and utshwala (fermented corn
beverage) were allowed until about the 1860s, when a new generation of American
missionaries arrived to the stations in Natal. The existing converted community
opposed the new restrictions on lobola and utshwala. Instead, converts validated or
invalidated the cultural practice in question by using their own interpretations of the
Bible and therefore fashioning their own Christian identity. The beer in question is called utshwala, a fermented corn drink that one
scholar describes as, “more filling than intoxicating.”149 Utshwala was made by the
women of the family, and was used in two situations: one health, and the other social.
Utshwala was considered a filling and healthy beverage, and its consistency made it
easier to consume and digest by those who were either sick or elderly. Additionally, it
was a popular and refreshing beverage and was served to all participants of all social
gatherings, such as weddings, engagement parties, birthdays, etc. 150 Aside from
drinking utshwala in their homes on the mission stations, the kholwa community
members would also be expected to drink this fermented corn beverage while
149
Robert J. Houle, Making African Christianity: Africans Reimagining Their Faiths in Colonial South
Africa (Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press, 2011), 99.
150
Ibid, 101.
41 attending events of their unconverted extended families outside the mission station.
For instance, consuming utshwala at a wedding was necessary in order “to bring the
blessing of the ancestors down on the new household.”151 Missionaries opposed the production and consumption of utshwala in order to
exert control over the kholwa community, both on the mission station and outside its
boundaries. They were convinced that drinking utshwala at social events outside of
the station was “inherently conducive to immorality,” specifically alcoholism and
ancestor worship.152 The temperance movement of the United States was influential
to the American missionaries in Natal, and they intended on imposing the same moral
reforms in Southern Africa.153 Consuming utshwala at social events also implied
ancestor veneration, as in the example of a typical Zulu wedding in the previous
paragraph. While the kholwa community was expected to be a beacon of Christian
exceptionalism to the unconverted community, participating in events off the mission
station signified gaps in the missionaries’ control over kholwa life. The missionary
agenda regarding utshwala was therefore centered on imposing a standard of
Christian respectability on the lives and identity of the kholwa community. The kholwa community was interested in retaining ties to their Zulu identity,
despite the missionary agenda against utshwala. In response to the accusation of
ancestor veneration, converts maintained that they did not believe in the amadhlozi,
and consumed utshwala at social gatherings to observe the customs regarding that
151
Robert J. Houle, Making African Christianity: Africans Reimagining Their Faiths in Colonial South
Africa Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press, 2011), 73.
152
Robert J. Houle, Making African Christianity: Africans Reimagining Their Faiths in Colonial South
Africa Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press, 2011), 99.
153
Ibid, 99.
42 particular event.154 Converts also defended utshwala on the basis of its nutritional
benefits. One elderly convert, Hobiana, who “fully demonstrated his commitment to
Christianity” by giving up his second and third wives and abandoning ancestor
worship, found it absurd that he should “give up his beer.”155 Hobiana had no teeth
left and did not see why the typical Zulu beverage, this “little cup of beer,” should
hinder his opportunity for salvation.156 While converts eventually lost the debate
concerning utshwala, it is one example of how the kholwa sought to exercise agency
in a cultural habit they saw as both nutritionally important and as a form of social
bonding. The example of lobola, or bride price, is a discussion that involves the
economic and social status of the entire family, and was more tenaciously defended
by the converted community. Lobola, or bride price, was a ubiquitous social practice in Southern Africa.
Through marriage, the practice of lobola represented a remedy to the loss of a
daughter’s productive powers in her father’s household.157 During an engagement,
the groom, with assistance from his family, would present his prospective father-inlaw with cattle for his bride’s hand in marriage. Lobola was therefore also a public
demonstration of a family’s economic status and ensured a spectacle of visible
respectability for the kholwa community, as marriages without lobola were
considered illegitimate by traditional African standards.158 Therefore, lobola indicated
a public, contractual agreement of marriage between two individuals and their
154
Ibid, 96.
Robert J. Houle, Making African Christianity: Africans Reimagining Their Faiths in Colonial South
Africa Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press, 2011), 102.
156
Robert J. Houle, Making African Christianity: Africans Reimagining Their Faiths in Colonial South
Africa Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press, 2011), 102.
157
Ibid, 98.
158
Ibid, 93.
155
43 families in the same way that a marriage license would. It was integral to indigenous
African ideas regarding marriage, wealth, and respectability. As such, it was
necessary that the practice of lobola be endorsed by the adopted religious tradition of
the kholwa community. Missionaries wanted to enforce a standard of Christian behavior upon the
kholwa community that did not include lobola. On the Umsumduze station, bans were
made on “polygamy, beer-drinking, isangu (hemp) smoking, and lobola.” 159
American missionaries coming to Natal in the 1860’s “grew up as abolitionists, [and]
readily compared lobola with slavery.”160 Therefore missionary resistance to lobola
constituted an oversimplification of lobola as a purely commercial exchange of
women and cattle.161 Missionaries were not interested in encouraging a Zulu Christian
community, but rather an American one.162 The kholwa community wanted to continue practicing lobola in order to
maintain economic agency and their indigenous culture. Cattle were the main marker
of wealth and status in indigenous society, so the attack on lobola was an attack on
the economic status of the converted community. Lobola also signified the last
chance to “build social connections and status with traditionalist friends and family
without sacrificing their Christian identity.” 163 The status and respectability of a
family was related to the spectacle of their wealth in cattle. Therefore converted
families who abandoned lobola could not be seen as respectable or successful outside
159
Robert J. Houle, Making African Christianity: Africans Reimagining Their Faiths in Colonial South
Africa (Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press, 2011), 99.
160
Robert J. Houle, Making African Christianity: Africans Reimagining Their Faiths in Colonial South
Africa (Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press, 2011), 97.
161
Ibid, 98.
162
Ibid, 98.
163
Ibid, 98.
44 the mission station. Additionally, the issue of translatability between European and
Africans forms is raised in this situation, as converts held that “the language
surrounding lobola could not be commercial…umfazi, or wife, could not be translated
to mean slave or servant just as indoda, or husband, could not be translated as
master.”164 The continued resistance to lobola by the American missionaries indicates
their refusal to grant African agency on the station. The kholwa were aware of the cultural meaning and importance of lobola, but
Protestant missionaries continued to question its moral status. As much as
missionaries during this time were committed to the African vernacular in translation,
“they tended to dismiss African worldviews and African practices in Christian
worship and spiritual life.” 165 These rules restricting African cultural forms
“represented the culmination of several decades of increasing pressure on amakholwa
to purify their lives according to the moral ideals of missionaries.”166 As a result, the
converts then took on this process of making Christianity relevant to African life by
asserting their professed right to practice lobola without damaging their Christian
identity. Theological disputes regarding utshwala and lobola took place within the
African-Christian communities at weekly community meetings. Such disputes are
indicative of how seriously kholwa took their conversion, and how actively they
wanted to reconcile their Christian and African values. While converts were willing
164
Robert J. Houle, Making African Christianity: Africans Reimagining Their Faiths in Colonial South
Africa (Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press, 2011), 98.
165
Georg Scriba and Gunar Lislerud, “Lutheran Missions and Churches in South Africa,” in
Christianity in South Africa, ed. Richard Elphick and Rodney Davenport (Berkeley: University of
California Press: 1997), 187.
166
Robert J. Houle, Making African Christianity: Africans Reimagining Their Faiths in Colonial South
Africa (Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press, 2011), 97.
45 to give up polygamy, ancestor veneration, and other aspects of traditional African
life, an attack on other practices, like lobola and the use of utshwala, reflected the fact
that the converts wanted to exercise agency and power in the formation of their
culture as Zulu converts. Lobola and utshwala were different from ancestor
veneration and polygamy. Converts would never be able to validate ancestor worship.
They all would have been well aware that worshipping supernatural entities other
than God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit would be completely unacceptable. Polygamy was also another topic that could not come close to missionary
acceptance. According to Robert Houle, “male converts understood that to be
Christian was to take only one wife.”167 Converts involved in assessing the validity of
indigenous cultural practices clearly felt that they were not in a position to
demonstrate their commitment to the faith and prioritize their Christian status. The
missionaries tended to exert power over situations using their distinctly non-African
worldviews, which only resulted in kholwa resentment, as they felt undeserving of
theologizing and practicing Christianity in ways that would suit their needs as
community members. In order to be fully entrenched in the context and lives of black
South Africans, Christianity needed to become fully theirs, without constant question
and reprobation by European or American missionaries. While this section has
discussed how converts wanted to adapt Christianity to encompass Zulu cultural
forms, it will now turn towards a discussion of how Christianity was “indigenized” in
South Africa, using African Independent Churches as an example. 167
Robert J. Houle, Making African Christianity: Africans Reimagining Their Faiths in Colonial South
Africa (Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press, 2011), 93.
46 The proliferation of African Independent Churches during the early 20th
century addressed the needs of African Christian communities that were looking to
construct and practice a Christianity that could address the political and social
realities of their time and space. As African polities provided increasingly less
protection from dehumanizing settler and colonial forces in Southern Africa,
becoming an active member in the religious community was the only way that black
Southern African (men) could occupy positions of power in their communities. A
discussion of the African Independent Church movements in Southern Africa and
their emphasis on healing and worship indicate the black struggle to find meaning,
power, and community. Finally, the independent Churches became a space where an
African Christian identity could be fully realized in a South African context. Indigenization: The Case of Zionist African Independent Churches From the 1880’s onward, disputes on mission stations regarding traditional
African cultural practices resulted in the expulsion of a number of African converts
from mission stations.168 Sometimes, these members were permanently removed, and
other times they were re-admitted into full membership after offenses such as beer
drinking, accepting lobola, or engaging in polygamist practices were adequately
resolved in the eyes of the missionaries. Among those permanently banished from
the mission station, however, African-Christian beliefs and practices persisted, “and
gradually an expatriate community grew.” 169 As a result of a growth of these
168
Robert J. Houle, Making African Christianity: Africans Reimagining Their Faiths in Colonial South
Africa (Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press, 2011), 103.
169
Robert J. Houle, Making African Christianity: Africans Reimagining Their Faiths in Colonial South
Africa (Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press, 2011), 103.
47 communities, and of communities of families who willingly left mission stations to
claim indigenous Christian authority, a number of churches in South Africa began to
form beyond the control of mission churches or white Christianity.170 While these independent churches were heavily influenced by missionary
church culture in Southern Africa, they also engaged in international correspondence
with American churches. The terms “African Initiated Churches” or “African
Independent Churches,” which are more or less interchangeable, both indicate the
churches specifically black membership and management. These churches
specifically addressed the contexts in which black South Africans lived, especially as
the 20th century progressed from segregation to official apartheid policy. Thanks to
their indigenous leadership, the AICs regularly addressed the dehumanizing
economic, social, and political environments of the time, constructing alternative
(which is to say, non-European) locations of Christian power and authority. Throughout the 20th century, AICs and their congregants multiplied across
Southern Africa. By 1990, there were over 6,000 churches, and this number
accounted for over 47% of the black Christian population in South Africa.171 The
proliferation of AICs in South Africa over the course of the 20th century demonstrate
how blacks were interested in forging for themselves a black religious experience in
South Africa. In this section, the themes of divine healing, black leadership, and
global identity in the Zionist Churches of South Africa will be treated as creative
theological and political endeavors by which black South Africans sought to
170
Hennie Pretorius and Liza Jafta, “ ‘A Branch Springs Out’: African Initiated Churches,” in
Christianity in South Africa, ed. Richard Elphick and Rodney Davenport (Berkeley: University of
California Press: 1997), 211.
171
David Chidester, Religions of South Africa (London: Routledge 1992), 114.
48 contextualize their existence and exercise agency. Additionally, these creative
endeavors are the final stage in a process toward an indigenous, South African
Christianity. While the Zionist churches in South Africa were instances of “local,
black appropriation of Christianity,” they did operate within a Zionist global network
largely headed by whites in the United States.172 Black leaders of the Zionist churches
in South Africa were able to use the relationship between local congregation and
global Zionist network against white church control in South Africa. The Zionist churches in South Africa were fashioned after the Christian
Catholic Church in Chicago, founded in 1896 by a white Australian Congregationalist
minister, John Alexander Dowie.173 In 1900, Dowie used church funds to purchase
land north of Chicago, USA, to found a town called Zion.174 In 1904, the town had its
largest population of about 6,000 members.175 Dowie’s followers, called Zionists,
were urban lower-middle class and working class families attracted to Dowie’s
congregation because of his emphasis on divine healing. According to scholar Joel
Cabrita, “Zion’s enactment of bodily and spiritual health was powerfully displayed by
frequent healing services in Zion’s Tabernacle.”176 All medical professionals and
172
Joel Cabrita, “An Introduction to the Letters of Isaiah Moteka: The Correspondence of a TwentiethCentury South African Zionist Minister.” Africa, Vol. 84, pp 163-198
doi:10.1017/S0001972014000011, 179.
173
Joel Cabrita, “People of Adam: Divine Healing and Racial Cosmopolitanism in the Early
Twentieth-Century Transvaal, South Africa,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2015, pp. 131, 9.
174
Joel Cabrita, “People of Adam: Divine Healing and Racial Cosmopolitanism in the Early
Twentieth-Century Transvaal, South Africa,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2015, pp. 131, 9.
175
Ibid, 9.
176
Ibid, 9.
49 medicines were banned from the community. Members of the community were
healed of physical ailments through prayer at church meetings.177 The Christian Catholic Church in Chicago, USA, brought the Zionist Church
movement to Southern Africa. This movement in South Africa, like in Chicago,
focused particularly on divine healing, or the alleviation of physical ailments through
prayer.178 During this period, many African Americans were working as domestic
servants or in the industrial sectors under poor conditions. Therefore they saw divine
healing rituals as particularly rehabilitative.179 Likewise, black South Africans in the
early 20th century were drawn to healing rituals thanks to their extremely poor living
and working conditions, with “most urban workers [were] living in mine compounds,
overcrowded locations, or slum-yards, and the majority of Africans in the rural areas
[living] with limited access to land” and little mobility.180 Zionist churches headed by
black ministers were supportive communities where the increasingly negative
political and social conditions of blacks could be addressed through divine healing.
Divine Healing The practice of divine healing, brought by American Zionists to South Africa,
became a religious experience that was uniquely fashioned and practiced by South
African Zionist churches. As arguably the most important part of practice, divine
177
Ibid, 11.
Joel Cabrita, “An Introduction to the Letters of Isaiah Moteka: The Correspondence of a TwentiethCentury South African Zionist Minister.” Africa, Vol. 84, pp 163-198
doi:10.1017/S0001972014000011, 164.
179
Joel Cabrita, “People of Adam: Divine Healing and Racial Cosmopolitanism in the Early
Twentieth-Century Transvaal, South Africa,” forthcoming in Comparative Studies in Society and
History, 2015, (page numbers printed from draft), 11.
180
Hennie Pretorius and Liza Jafta, “ ‘A Branch Springs Out’: African Initiated Churches,” in
Christianity in South Africa, ed. Richard Elphick and Rodney Davenport (Berkeley: University of
California Press: 1997), 217.
178
50 healing in Zionist communities was present in worship services of the congregation,
in rituals of purification, and in private consultation with a (black) religious leader.181
In the worship services, the ritual of divine healing involved the entire congregation
present. While the religious leaders infused the afflicted individual’s body with the
Holy Spirit through prayer, the congregation enhanced the spiritual power in the
space by praying, singing, speaking in tongues, and therefore “reaffirmed the social
solidarity of the congregation.”182 Divine healing rituals in the Zionist communities of
South Africa addressed the immediate social conditions of the congregation, usually
the poorest of the working class.183 While emphasis on healing rituals represent the
parallel relationship between the spiritual and material in Zionist culture in the US
and in South Africa, particularly in Zulu Zionist communities, African concepts of
water with regards to healing were often used in the powerful emotional experience
of divine healing.184 Indigenous African concepts regarding the relationship between medicine and
religion point to why divine healing would have become “the pivot of all Church
activity” in South African Zionist churches.185 For example, the verb “to heal” also
means “to sacrifice” in some Bantu idioms.186 This linguistic similarity demonstrates
the relationship between religious practice and physical health in indigenous African
thought, as neglected ancestor spirits might inflict illness or bad luck upon their
181
David Chidester, Religions of South Africa (London: Routledge 1992), 141.
David Chidester, Religions of South Africa (London: Routledge 1992), 141.
183
Ibid, 138.
184
James Kiernan, “Saltwater and Ashes: Instruments of Curing among Some Zulu Zionists,” Journal
of Religion in Africa, Vol. 9, Fasc. 1 (1978), doi: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1581081, 30.
185
Bengt G. M. Sundkler, Bantu Prophets in South Africa (Oxford University Press: London, 1961),
220.
186
Bengt G. M. Sundkler, Bantu Prophets in South Africa (Oxford University Press: London, 1961),
221.
182
51 descendants.187 Similarly, in many rural South African Zionist communities, physical
illnesses were associated with spiritual transgressions.188 Therefore, on a local level,
Christianity was capable of addressing the interrelatedness of spiritual and physical
problems within Zionist communities. In Zionist communities, water was seen as an element imbued with spiritual
power and was often used to heal someone suffering from affliction. Again, physical
ailments were directly associated with spiritual impurity or the presence of an evil
spirit. In traditional African thought, spanning from West Africa to Southern Africa,
the element of water is a sacred power of purification and its use signified a return “to
freshness, to immaculate concentration of mind… and societal happening[s].” 189
During purification rituals, ocean water, or water mixed with salt and/or ashes, would
be imbibed repeatedly over the course of a few days.190 Water was “frequently
applied internally rather than externally” because of its metaphysical cooling
properties. 191 These properties could cure physical ailments, especially stomach
problems that were a result of physical or spiritual problems. American Zionist culture put material and spiritual woes on the same plane;
both were equally suffused into the physical realities of these religious communities.
Water as a vital element of life, healing, and purity, could therefore be introduced into
the healing rituals that addressed physical and moral ailments, as it too occupied both
187
Bengt G. M. Sundkler, Bantu Prophets in South Africa (Oxford University Press: London, 1961),
225.
188
Bengt G. M. Sundkler, Bantu Prophets in South Africa (Oxford University Press: London, 1961),
228.
189
Robert Farris Thompson, “An Aesthetic of the Cool,” African Arts, Vol. 7, No. 1 (1973), doi:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/3334749, 41.
190
Ashes were also a cooling agent because they are the result of a cooling fire, and added another
layer of curative metaphysical power to the mixture of saltwater. (Kiernan: 1978, 30)
191
James Kiernan, “Saltwater and Ashes: Instruments of Curing among Some Zulu Zionists,” Journal
of Religion in Africa, Vol. 9, Fasc. 1 (1978), doi: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1581081, 30.
52 spheres simultaneously. The salt and ash water concoction, “generally referred to as
isiwasho, which is a corrupt form of the word ‘washing’,” serves as a twofold
expellant of what is physically agitating the person’s body, as well as of “evil spirits
which are causing the affliction.”192 Therefore while foreign agents introduced the
practice of divine healing to African communities, the independent church
communities were able to shape this practice with their own traditional concepts
regarding the abstract. These communities were able to fashion their own form of
practice using traditional curative substances in order to heal each other and
themselves as a whole. While the Zionist churches (and their emphasis on divine
healing) are one type of AIC, black leadership and membership has been the
distinctive feature of all AICs in South Africa.
Black Leadership The AICs allowed members and religious leaders to foster “a new
consciousness of African dignity and self-reliance” by creating new enclaves of
discursive power.193 African ministers who were missionary-trained resented their
mistreatment among white clergymen, and began to form religious organizations in
their communities. For example, in 1884, a Wesleyan-trained African preacher,
Nehemiah Tile, left the church because of his increasing sympathies for the political
actions of the Thembu [a Xhosa group] against colonial government in the eastern
192
James Kiernan, “Saltwater and Ashes: Instruments of Curing among Some Zulu Zionists,” Journal
of Religion in Africa, Vol. 9, Fasc. 1 (1978), doi: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1581081, 30.
193
Hennie Pretorius and Liza Jafta, “ ‘A Branch Springs Out’: African Initiated Churches,” in
Christianity in South Africa, ed. Richard Elphick and Rodney Davenport (Berkeley: University of
California Press: 1997), 215.
53 Cape. 194 He then went on to founded the Thembu National Church, where he
“preserved Methodist forms of worship…but spoke against paying hut taxes, against
pass laws, against white settlement, and against the network of magistrates that
enforced colonial rule.” 195 In another example of black leadership against white
control, Mangena Mokone, Wesleyan Methodist minister, resigned from the church in
1892 to organize an Ethiopian Church. Rather than organize the church under a
specific ethnic identity, as Nehemiah Tile had, Mokone organized the Ethiopian
church to refer to the future evangelization of Africa, by Africans, without white
rulers.196
Although both Mokone and Tile represent earlier and different examples of
black leadership in separatist church movements, their colleagues and successors
would also exhibit a sense of ambition and self-government in the subsequent
independent church movements of the 20th century. While Mokone and Tile were
politically vocal and antagonistic, the AICs that emerged in their wake usually
positioned themselves politically as posing no threat to local and national
governments, especially during the apartheid era. It was very important for black
religious leaders to be seen as nonthreatening, so that their churches might achieve
government recognition. And precisely by appearing politically non-threatening, they
became politically revolutionary.
194
David Chidester, Religions of South Africa (London: Routledge 1992), 114-115.
David Chidester, Religions of South Africa (London: Routledge 1992), 114-115.
196
Bengt G. M. Sundkler, Bantu Prophets in South Africa (Oxford University Press: London, 1961),
39.
195
54 Global Identity In the mid 20th century, Isaiah Moteka, an ambitious Zionist minister from the
Orange Free State, was interested in achieving government recognition so that his
worshippers could construct a building.197 Isaish Moteka’s letters, now archived in
Pretoria, span from the 1930’s to about the 1960’s, and seek to legitimize his
congregation by persuading South African officials “that his church belonged to a
worldwide network of Zionist Christians—and crucially, one headed by whites.”198
Moteka’s church and political agenda indicated a relationship with the American
Zionist community, as his letters conveyed a “sense of cosmopolitan belonging.”199 In
claiming a cosmopolitan identity for himself and his congregation, Moteka put his
congregation on the map as part of a global network of Zionist churches in order to
receive recognition from the South African government.200 At the same time, he used
this cosmopolitan identity to subtly articulate a critique against the mistreatment of
blacks in South Africa in his letters to the NAD (The Native Affairs Department).201
Black leadership in this Zionist congregation became particularly adept in
advocating for itself by pitting two types of white authority against each other,
namely the white-led American Zionist Church against the white-led South African
government. While black leadership in the church was seen as a threat to the whiteminority state in South Africa, white American influences on the independent church
197
Joel Cabrita, “An Introduction to the Letter of Isaiah Moteka: The Correspondence of a Twentiethcentury South African Zionist Minister,” in Africa, Vol. 84, pp 163-198
doi:10.1017/S0001972014000011, 169.
198
Joel Cabrita, “An Introduction to the Letter of Isaiah Moteka: The Correspondence of a Twentiethcentury South African Zionist Minister,” in Africa, Vol. 84, pp 163-198
doi:10.1017/S0001972014000011, 174.
199
Ibid, 170.
200
Ibid, 164.
201
Ibid, 164.
55 signified a “slippage between the local and the global, invoking in the same breath
loyalty to Pretoria and Zion, USA.”202 Therefore, the relationship between Zionist
American churches and Zionist churches in South Africa reflects an important
political strategy among black South African church leaders. In their local setting,
black-led churches exercised agency by focusing on prayer and healing. On the
national and global levels, these same churches gained recognition as members of
regional and transatlantic (particularly American) Zionist networks.203 By means of
these partnerships, black ministers like Moteka could subtly criticize the South
African “state’s racial policies” of “dividing blacks and whites [and] denying
Africans full citizenship,” while claiming to be part of an ecclesiastical hierarchy
headed by whites.204 For example, Moteka often mentioned how “blacks aspired to
equality with whites” in letters to the Native Affairs Department of South Africa
(NAD).205 For Zionist ministers who maintained correspondence with the church in
the United States, “Zion’s internationalism, and its corresponding racial
cosmopolitanism,” served the local political agenda of black Zionist ministers in
South Africa.206
Moteka’s letters serve as an example of a critique to and against the South
African government, but his opinion becomes elevated above the state as he claims
202
Joel Cabrita, “An Introduction to the Letter of Isaiah Moteka: The Correspondence of a Twentiethcentury South African Zionist Minister,” in Africa, Vol. 84, pp 163-198
doi:10.1017/S0001972014000011, 172.
203 Joel Cabrita, “An Introduction to the Letter of Isaiah Moteka: The Correspondence of a Twentiethcentury South African Zionist Minister,” in Africa, Vol. 84, pp 163-198
doi:10.1017/S0001972014000011, 176. 204
Ibid, 173.
205
Ibid, 174.
206
Joel Cabrita, “An Introduction to the Letter of Isaiah Moteka: The Correspondence of a Twentiethcentury South African Zionist Minister,” in Africa, Vol. 84, pp 163-198
doi:10.1017/S0001972014000011, 174.
56 divine favor. While Moteka was concerned with achieving governmental recognition,
his letters also pointed to his belief that Jesus Christ ruled over his congregation,
South Africa, and the world equally—not according to racial hierarchies.207 As such,
local religious leaders like Moteka were capable of subverting the power of the South
African government while advocating recognition for their local congregations.208
While Moteka was eventually unable to receive approval for a church building from
the NAD, his letters “subordinated earthly power to the Kingdom of God.”209 This
rhetoric brought the white political powers of South Africa to the same level of
judgment received by Moteka’s congregation, under God. Isaiah Moteka’s letters
were therefore able to convey obedience to the South African government in action
while it simultaneously destabilized
Black leaders were therefore able to exercise agency in the ways their
congregations were organized and how they were perceived by national
administrative powers. Independent churches, and Zionst churches as the focus of this
section, constitute the final stage in indigenizing Christianity for black South
Africans.
207
Joel Cabrita, “An Introduction to the Letter of Isaiah Moteka: The Correspondence of a Twentiethcentury South African Zionist Minister,” in Africa, Vol. 84, pp 163-198
doi:10.1017/S0001972014000011, 164.
208
Ibid,164.
209
Ibid,179.
57 Conclusion The missionary goal, according to the Comaroffs, was to colonize African
consciousness through Christianity for British management.210 However, this chapter
has pointed to the process by which Africans made Christianity their own before
accepting it. This chapter has traced the indigenization of Christianity from its
introduction to traditional African society to its full comprehension and entrenchment
in the lives of black South Africans. African leaders staunchly resisted the
introduction of Christianity by missionaries, fearing the total breakdown of traditional
society would result from exposure to Western culture. However, people were still
drawn to the mission stations. Individuals seeking to flee their lives on the homestead
or better their lives economically became the first converts on mission stations. At
first, the families and larger communities of these individuals resisted and lamented
the conversion of their family members. However, as converts became interested in
adapting Christianity to include traditional African cultural practices, the converted
community was able to maintain relationships with unconverted African
communities. In the final stage of this process, Christianity was fully indigenized into the
context of black South African life. While black Christians did stay involved in
missionary churches throughout the 20th century, African Independent Churches were
more directly involved in adapting and indigenizing Christianity, as they operated
outside of white control and in the rural areas, where most blacks lived. Black
210
Jean and John Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution: Christianity, Colonialism and
Consciousness in South Africa, Volume 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 4.
58 religious leaders and their congregations were therefore able to focus on practicing
Christianity in a way that made sense to them.
At the point of Christianity’s full entrenchment in black South African
society, “black faith emerged out of black people’s wrestling with suffering, the
struggle to make sense out of their senseless situation” during segregation and
apartheid.211 In the 1970’s and 1980’s, towards the end of the apartheid regime, Black
Theologians advanced an abrasive critique on apartheid and white liberals. Black
Theologians also worked to give black South Africans the language and ability to
overcome the overwhelming powers of apartheid and death with their Christian
identity. The process of indigenizing Christianity is important in assessing how this
tradition could become such an important interpretative tool with which to understand
and rediscover black identity in South Africa.
211
James H. Cone, The Cross and The Lynching Tree (New York: Orbis Books, 2011), 124.
59 Chapter III: Towards a Reconceptualization of Blackness
Black Theology in South Africa was constructed out of the situation in which
indigenous South Africans found themselves towards the end of the twentieth
century. Apartheid, the Afrikaans word for “apartness” was a policy that managed
socio-political relationships between South Africa’s white minority and non-white
majority. The policy sanctioned racial, political, and economic discrimination against
non-whites in order to keep whites in power. Racial segregation had been part of
South Africa’s legal system since the onslaught of colonial rule, but in 1948, the
Afrikaner National Party was elected to power and made apartheid, which it called
“separate development,” official state policy.212 Under the Population Registration
Act of 1950, the people of South Africa were consolidated into one of four categories
based on their racial characteristics: White, Black, Coloured (of Black and White
descent), and Indian. 213 Under apartheid, Blacks were relegated to unfertile,
circumscribed areas (known as “homelands”), stripped of political rights and access
to education, economically exploited and culturally subordinated. In the late 1960’s
and early 1970’s student-led anti-apartheid activism ushered in a movement that
sought to reclaim black identity and dignity. This group, called the Black
Consciousness Movement, offered an ideology of resistance that opened up the
possibility of black dignity in the face of oppression. Black Consciousness brought
black students and clergy together in order to talk about black identity during and
after apartheid.
212
Encyclopædia Britannica, “Apartheid,” accessed April 1st, 2014,
http://academic.eb.com/EBchecked/topic/29332/apartheid.
213
South African History Online, “The Population Registration Act of 1950,” accessed April 1st, 2015,
http://www.sahistory.org.za/dated-event/population-registration-act-1950-repealed.
60 Black Theology in South Africa elaborated on the thoughts of the Black
Consciousness Movement by interpreting the Gospel message in terms that were
relevant to the black experience. In Chapter, I, we encountered a series of negative
representations of blackness in patristic and medieval literature. In the early days of
Christianity, authors were deeply interested in making distinctions between correct
and incorrect forms of Christian practice, and between pure and impure social
identities. Insofar as it was associated with sin, hypersexuality, and diabolic
possession, blackness was effectively used as a foil for the virtuous Christian
community.
During the colonial period, these representations were transcribed onto actual
black people. In Chapter II, we recounted the invasion of Southern Africa by EuroChristian forces, armed among other things with a set of metaphoric associations
between blackness and evil. In spite of these associations, missionaries tended to
follow Origen in believing that blackness could be (spiritually) transformed into
holiness by means of conversion. As we saw, black South Africans were not initially
drawn to Christianity per se, but rather to the economic resources it offered. While
land and economic resources were being increasingly annexed by colonial or British
imperial control, many Africans found relative security on mission stations. Yet they
remained resistant to conversion itself, insofar as the Europeans insisted that
conversion entailed abandonment of all traditional cultural forms; that is, they were
trying to make South African blackness white. Believing the total rejection of African
culture to be unnecessary and undesirable, African converts began to separate form
the
white-managed
mission
stations
and
construct
indigenous
Christian
61 congregations. These communities encouraged black leadership, black solidarity, and
they maintained aspects of African culture that were not deemed anti-Christian; for
example, traditional food/drink and marriage customs were acceptable (and even
encouraged, as seen in Chapter II), even if polygamy and animal sacrifice were not.
It was upon this indigenized Christian foundation that Black Theology in
South Africa would build: if the earliest South African Christians reconfigured
Christian practice as a means of surviving under colonial rule, Black Theology
reconfigured the meaning of key Christian terms in order to empower and liberate
blacks under apartheid. This chapter will examine the situation of blacks under the
state policy of “apartness,” before examining the radical groups that worked against
it, and the major influences on Black Theology in South Africa. The focus of the
chapter will then turn toward the theological and the sociopolitical characteristics of
Black Theology—specifically, the reconfiguration of the divinity of God and the
humanity of blacks—which served to combat the dominant cultural structures of
apartheid.
Apartheid Legislation/Culture: Black Subordination and White Superordination
The roots of apartheid have their most solid foundation in the history of racial
inequalities that resulted from colonial economic exploitation, but which later came to
seem as though they had always been there. This seemingly “natural” distinction
between whites (made up of the English-speaking British and the Afrikaans speaking
Afrikaners) and “non-European” groups would be solidified during the 1948
elections. As sociologist Rupe Simms explains, the political system of apartheid
62 consistently entrusted “material and social privilege to White South Africans and
ensured that they monopolize political power so as to maintain that privilege.”214 In
this system, whites were assured of their political, social, cultural and economic
superiority. Blacks, Coloureds, Indians, Pakistani, and other Asian groups were
forced to internalize apartheid ideology and “perceive the conditions of their
exploitation” as natural.215
As seen in the second chapter, the first colonial outpost of the Dutch East
India Company in the Cape was a society that relied heavily on unpaid African
labor.216 Even though slavery was abolished by the imperial British government in
1833, this meant very little for the lives of these recently freed slaves.217 Native South
Africans and former slaves who were imported into the Cape continued to rely on
meager employment as farm and manual laborers for survival.218 This exploitative
economic structure, based on racial differences, continued throughout the colonial
period in South Africa. In fact, as Richard Elphick and Herman Giliomee explain, “by
the late eighteenth century race and class had overlapped for so long (in the sense that
almost all landholders and officials were Europeans and almost all members of other
racial groups were unfree or poor)” that this structure “appeared to be natural or God-
214
Rupe Simms, “Black Theology, A Weapon in the Struggle for Freedom: A Gramscian Analysis,”
Race and Society, Vol. 2, No. 2, 169.
215
Rupe Simms, “Black Theology, A Weapon in the Struggle for Freedom: A Gramscian Analysis,”
Race and Society, Vol. 2, No. 2, 169.
216
William M. Freund, “The Cape Under the Transitional Governments, 1795-1814,” in The Shaping
of South African Society, 1652-1840, edited by Richard Elphick and Hermann Giliomee (Middletown:
Wesleyan University Press, 1989), 335.
217
Leonard Thompson, A History of South Africa, 3rd edition (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2000), 53.
218
Nigel Worden, The Making of Modern South Africa: Conquest, Apartheid, Democracy (5th Edition)
(West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), accessed March 4, 2015,
http://site.ebrary.com/lib/wesleyan/reader.action?docID=10518634&ppg=95, 98.
63 given.” 219 The early economic exploitation of non-Europeans therefore lays the
groundwork for European racial and political domination throughout the twentieth
century.
The South Africa Act of 1909 created the Union of South Africa out of British
colonies and Afrikaner republics.220 From 1910 onward, white South African officials
were mainly concerned with the establishment and consolidation of white power. The
Act completely denied blacks political franchise.221 Additionally, it eroded the longstanding tradition of a multi-racial franchise system in the Cape.222During this period,
the rights of blacks became increasingly regulated and restricted by the government.
The black population became physically, economically, politically and culturally
limited, even more so than under colonial rule. These restrictions will be addressed in
order.
Blacks were first physically circumscribed though the Land Act of 1913. This
act regulated black acquisition of land by prohibiting the purchase and lease of land
219
Richard Elphick and Hermann Giliomee, “The origins and entrenchment of European dominance at
the Cape, 1652-c. 1840,” in The Shaping of South African Society, 1652-1840, edited by Richard
Elphick and Hermann Giliomee (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1989), 544.
220
Leonard Thompson, A History of South Africa, 3rd edition (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2000), 152.
221
Nigel Worden, The Making of Modern South Africa: Conquest, Apartheid, Democracy (5th Edition)
(West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), accessed March 4, 2015,
http://site.ebrary.com/lib/wesleyan/reader.action?docID=10518634&ppg=95, 81.
222
The Cape Franchise was established for the Cape Town municipality in 1839 and for representative
government in 1853 were not racially defined. The racial definition was not necessary because most
slaves were black and almost all masters were white. The 1853 standard for franchise was based on
annual income and property ownership: the minimum were £50 a year or property, which included
land, worth £25. This admitted a number of Coloured and African voters. The non-racial franchise was
at the core of mid-19th century Cape liberalism, according to Worden. Its low standards for franchise
were unique with regards to other constitutions of its time. Furthermore, it franchised Coloured and
African peasant farmers whose votes would support commercial development. Nigel Wordern, The
Making of South Africa: Conquest, Segregation, and Apartheid (2nd Edition) (Oxford: Blackwell
Publishers, 1995), 68-69.
64 anywhere outside an individual’s “homeland”. 223 For black South Africans, the
“homelands” amounted to 7% of the new Union’s land, scattered in the eastern area
of the country and given as a trust to the black population.224 Almost immediately
following the Act, the “homelands” or reserves, became unable to provide enough
food to feed people and pay taxes to provincial and central governments, a situation
hardly improved by the South African Native Trust’s increasing the land allotment to
11.7% in 1936.225 Furthermore, blacks were unable to leave these reserves unless they
were employed as tenant laborers by white-managed farms or factories.226 According
to historian Leonard Thompson, the reserves became little more than massive
“reservoirs of cheap, unskilled labor for white farmers and industrialists.”227
Blacks’ physical movement was further circumscribed by the Pass Laws,
which were passed mostly in the 1850’s and 1860’s in the pre-Union provinces.228
These Pass Laws stipulated that Africans, Coloureds, and Indians needed to carry a
“reference book” that contained their personal information and employment
history.229 Originating in the British colonies as a way to regulate the mobility of
slaves when they were not in their master’s home, Pass Laws made it difficult and
dangerous for blacks to work outside of white owned farms in rural areas.230 They
faced imprisonment, fines, or expulsion from the area if their papers were somehow
223
Leonard Thompson, A History of South Africa, 3rd edition (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2000), 163-164.
224
Leonard Thompson, A History of South Africa, 3rd edition (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2000), 163.
225
Ibid, 163.
226
Ibid, 165.
227
Ibid, 164.
228
South Africa History Online, “Pass Laws in South Africa 1800-1994,” accessed April 4th, 2015,
http://www.sahistory.org.za/south-africa-1806-1899/pass-laws-south-africa-1800-1994.
229
South Africa History Online, “Pass laws in South Africa 1800-1994,” accessed March 4, 2015,
http://www.sahistory.org.za/south-africa-1806-1899/pass-laws-south-africa-1800-1994
230
Leonard Thompson, A History of South Africa, 3rd edition (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2000), 166.
65 considered insufficient to a government official. The mobility of blacks was therefore
limited in a way that made it virtually impossible for them to be employed as
anything more than cheap, unskilled laborers by the exploitative industries.
Blacks, Coloureds, and Indians were also extremely limited in terms of
economic opportunity. In fact, the economic oppression of “non-Europeans” was seen
as necessary in order to socially and economically elevate poor white (Afrikaner)
people in South Africa.231 The Mines and Works Act, originally passed in 1911
established the official “colour bar” for South African employment. White workers
were legally given a monopoly of skilled labor positions, while Africans were
prohibited from strikes or unionizing.232 According to Leonard Thompson, the wage
gap between whites and African workers “was never less than eleven to one in cash
wages.” 233 Throughout the twentieth century, apartheid supporters would claim
legitimacy to apartheid by pointing out that blacks were “inferior because they [had]
no economists, no engineers, etc.,” but insofar as skilled labor by blacks was illegal,
there was no way for a black South African to become an economist or engineer.234
231
Since the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902), a war when the Dutch settlers of South Africa won
independence from the British, Afrikaners were living on farms in the interior of South Africa and
were mostly impoverished. Contributing factors included the worldwide economic depression, “local
droughts, and overpopulation” that resulted in massive urbanization over a short period of time. Of
course, non-whites in South Africa were living in even poorer conditions than whites and on a larger
scale, but this was not a huge problem for the government. The obligation to fix the “poor white
problem” was the basis upon with Afrikaner nationalism, was created. The years leading up to the
1948 election was marked by a deeply held belief on the part of Afrikaner politicians to save the
Afrikaner people, identity, and culture. Johann Kinghorn, “The Theology of Separate Equality: A
Critical outline of the DRC’s Position on Apartheid,” in Christianity Amidst Apartheid, ed. Martin
Prozesky (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), 61-63.
232
Leonard Thompson, A History of South Africa, 3rd edition (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2000), 167.
233
Leonard Thompson, A History of South Africa, 3rd edition (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2000), 167.
234
Steve Biko, “Black Consciousness and the Quest for a True Humanity,” in I Write What I Like, ed.
Aelred Stubbs C.R. (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1978), 88.
66 Under apartheid, Blacks and Coloureds were also culturally indoctrinated with
subordination. For example, the Bantu Education Act (1953) placed African
education under the jurisdiction of the Department of Bantu Affairs. Prior to this
legislation, African children had almost all been taught by missionary schools,
subsidized by the government. This Act imposed a curriculum that highlighted the
importance of “separate development” between whites and traditional “Bantu
culture.”235 Furthermore, funding to these missionary schools for Africans became
precariously low under official state control. 236 The Extension of University
Education Act (1959) established three colleges for black students, one for Coloureds,
and one for Indians. This law denied the admission of black students to white
universities without written permission from the Minister of Internal Affairs. 237
Blacks were therefore culturally indoctrinated with apartheid ideology throughout
their educational careers.
Apartheid and the Dutch Reformed Church
These physical, economic, and cultural restrictions were reaffirmed and
augmented by religious practices under apartheid. As briefly explained in Chapter II,
the Dutch Reformed Church (DRC) had been involved with the historical processes in
235
Nigel Worden, The Making of Modern South Africa: Conquest, Apartheid, Democracy (5th Edition)
(West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), accessed March 4, 2015,
http://site.ebrary.com/lib/wesleyan/reader.action?docID=10518634&ppg=95, 105.
236
David Welsh and J. E. Spence, Ending Apartheid (Harlow: Pearson Education Limited, 2011), 19.
237
Padraig O’Malley, “1959. Extension of University Education Act No. 45,” in The Nelson Mandela
Centre of Memory, accessed March 23, 2015,
https://www.nelsonmandela.org/omalley/index.php/site/q/03lv01538/04lv01828/05lv01829/06lv01898
.htm
67 South Africa since the establishment of the Cape colony in 1652.238 In the midnineteenth century, the DRC had many first-generation African converts. According
to historian Johann Kinghorn, “differences in language [and] culture” created friction
between white and black church members.239 White church-goers therefore began to
propose the idea of having separate church services or congregations for the African
converts.240 According to Kinghorn, the DRC in the nineteenth century theologically
accepted the humanity of blacks; but for “practical” reasons sought to separate its
white and black congregations.241 While Kinghorn claims that this separation was not
indicative of the church’s political opinions, he does acknowledge that the move
toward separation was retroactively identified as “the first step in a process which
was coming to fruition in the policy of apartheid.”242
Regardless of the intention, separate churches were founded in order to cater
to the social and political wishes of the Afrikaner congregations. These non-white
“daughter churches” were the Coloured Dutch Reformed Mission Church and the
African Dutch Reformed Church in Africa.243 In accordance with apartheid ideology,
Black and Coloured congregations of the DRC were taught that their racial inferiority
was divinely sanctioned. According to scholar Daniel Magaziner, “black students
238
Johann Kinghorn, “The Theology of Separate Equality: A Critical outline of the DRC’s Position on
Apartheid,” in Christianity Amidst Apartheid, ed. Martin Prozesky (New York: St. Martin’s Press,
1990), 57.
239
Johann Kinghorn, “The Theology of Separate Equality: A Critical outline of the DRC’s Position on
Apartheid,” in Christianity Amidst Apartheid, ed. Martin Prozesky (New York: St. Martin’s Press,
1990), 58.
240
Ibid, 59.
241
Ibid, 59.
242
Ibid, 59.
243
Daniel Magaziner, The Law and the Prophets: Black Consciousness in South Africa, 1968-1977
(Athens: University of Ohio Press, 2010), accessed March 13th, 2015.
http://site.ebrary.com/lib/wesleyan/reader.action?docID=10430959&ppg=8, 62.
68 were taught that Afrikaners were a chosen people,” and that blacks occupied a
inferior space and function in the world “because God wanted [them] there.”244
White congregants were uncomfortable with sharing religious spaces with
Africans because they were ignorant of and discriminatory against African culture.
This echoes the missionary mistrust of African culture we encounter in Chapter II.
Europeans coming to Southern Africa had deeply ingrained negative associations
with blackness and black bodies. These xenophobic tendencies among missionaries
and colonists in modern South Africa reflect the negative representations of blackness
in early Christian sources, as seen in Chapter I. In the early 20th century, the between
African and white in churches would take on deeper theological and ontological
meanings, with the implementation of segregation laws, and later, apartheid.
In order to advance the concept of “separate development,” DRC employed
Dutch Neo-Calvinist theologian Abraham Kuyper.245 Kuyper gave special attention to
a verse in the Epistle to the Romans, in which Paul writes that there are many organs
and limbs in the body that serve different functions, and urges Christians to use their
talents to serve God.246 Kuyper used this description as an interpretation applicable to
ethno-racial groups.247 For example, just as the merciful were asked to act according
244
Daniel Magaziner, The Law and the Prophets: Black Consciousness in South Africa, 1968-1977
(Athens: University of Ohio Press, 2010), accessed March 13th, 2015.
http://site.ebrary.com/lib/wesleyan/reader.action?docID=10430959&ppg=8, 62.
245
Daniel Magaziner, The Law and the Prophets: Black Consciousness in South Africa, 1968-1977
(Athens: University of Ohio Press, 2010), accessed March 13th, 2015.
http://site.ebrary.com/lib/wesleyan/reader.action?docID=10430959&ppg=8, 61.
246
“For by the grace given to me I bid every one among you not to think himself more highly than he
ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith which God has
assigned him. For as in one body we have many members, and all the members do not have the same
function, so we, though many, are one body in Christ, and individually members of one another.” In,
Romans 12:3-5 (Revised Standard Edition).
247
Daniel Magaziner, The Law and the Prophets: Black Consciousness in South Africa, 1968-1977
(Athens: University of Ohio Press, 2010), accessed March 13th, 2015.
http://site.ebrary.com/lib/wesleyan/reader.action?docID=10430959&ppg=8, 61.
69 to the faith and the teachers asked to teach, each “ethic group” was tasked with their
“unique” responsibilities. For whites, this was taking charge of the state of affairs,
and for blacks, it was total submission.248According to this developing neo-Calvinism
as espoused by Kuyper’s thought, “mankind maintained its distinctiveness by having
different nations, different peoples, and even different churches participate in their
unique and separate relationships with the divine.”249 By the 1930’s this idea would
become official DRC orthodoxy.250
According to the DRC, the role of Blacks and Coloureds within Christian
cosmology was very clear: to passively accept their place of subordination in South
African society. Blacks were existentially devoid of value within the apartheid
ideology, as their status and importance within this system is revealed in their
acceptance of ridicule—as in the example of “Ethiopian Moses,” the desert father
encountered in Chapter I. Blacks living under this ideology of separation and
subordination in South Africa were expected to find existential meaning in the
Christian tradition through an ideology that denied their own dignity.
These standards for black life in South Africa provoke several questions. Is
there another way to be black and Christian than to submit to “separation” from and
rule by whites? Do the Bible and the Christian message have anything to say to the
black South African under apartheid? If so, what? As seen in Chapter II, early black
converts were deeply interested in negotiating the terms of their Christian (and
248
Daniel Magaziner, The Law and the Prophets: Black Consciousness in South Africa, 1968-1977
(Athens: University of Ohio Press, 2010), accessed March 13th, 2015.
http://site.ebrary.com/lib/wesleyan/reader.action?docID=10430959&ppg=8, 61.
249
Daniel Magaziner, The Law and the Prophets: Black Consciousness in South Africa, 1968-1977
(Athens: University of Ohio Press, 2010), accessed March 13th, 2015.
http://site.ebrary.com/lib/wesleyan/reader.action?docID=10430959&ppg=8, 62.
250
Ibid, 62.
70 African) identities. For example, the indigenous traditions of lobola and utshwala
were defended in light of their cultural importance to the Zulu converted community.
These same questions persisted throughout the twentieth century and were of
particular interest to students involved in the Black Consciousness Movement in the
1960s and 1970s. Influenced by the Black Consciousness Movement and American
Black Theology, students and clergy in South Africa decided that this question could
only be solved through a reinterpretation of the gospel.
Black Consciousness: Who is Black?
The Black Consciousness Movement began in 1969 with the founding of
SASO (South African Student Organization), an all-black student group led by a
medical student and political activist, Steve Biko.251 By the early 1970’s, SASO led
black student resistance to apartheid in a movement called Black Consciousness.252
Between 1968 and 1977, this movement incited “a resurgence in popular pressure
against apartheid,” inspiring “black South Africans with new ideas about dignity and
self-worth.”253
These “new ideas” entailed a reassessment of what blackness was and what it
meant. In I Write What I Like, Steve Biko writes that black people are “by law or
tradition politically, economically, and socially discriminated against as a group in
251
Daniel Magaziner, The Law and the Prophets: Black Consciousness in South Africa, 1968-1977
(Athens: University of Ohio Press, 2010), accessed March 13th, 2015.
http://site.ebrary.com/lib/wesleyan/reader.action?docID=10430959&ppg=8, 3.
252
Daniel Magaziner, The Law and the Prophets: Black Consciousness in South Africa, 1968-1977
(Athens: University of Ohio Press, 2010), accessed March 13th, 2015.
http://site.ebrary.com/lib/wesleyan/reader.action?docID=10430959&ppg=8, 4.
253
Ibid, 4.
71 the South African society.”254 By this logic, Biko was describing all non-whites in
South Africa, Blacks, Coloureds, and Indians, as black. Over against such oppression,
Biko insisted that blacks are also a people who identify “themselves as a unit in the
struggle towards the realisation of their aspirations,” namely, freedom.255 For Biko,
the term “black” had the power to counteract repressive South African government’s
effectively negative designation of people of color as “non-white.” In fact, Biko
claimed, “by describing yourself as black you have started on a road towards
emancipation.”256 Therefore, blackness for him was not just a skin pigmentation, but
more specifically, a mental state.257 Hence, the term “black consciousness.”
The Black Consciousness Movement wanted to mobilize black South Africans
against apartheid by uniting the marginalized black majority in South Africa. The
system of apartheid had subtly incited Blacks, Indians, and Coloureds toward
animosity against each other.258 For example, Biko explained, Coloureds, disliked
blacks because their partial Africanness denied them “the chance of assimilation into
the white world.”259 Black Consciousness therefore worked against these “inter-group
suspicions” by insisting that the discord between Blacks, Coloureds and Indians was
the deliberate intent of apartheid ideology.260 For Biko, this friction is easily solved if
254
Steve Biko, “The Definition of Black Consciousness,” in I Write What I Like, ed. Aelred Stubbs
C.R. (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1978), 48.
255
Steve Biko, “The Definition of Black Consciousness,” in I Write What I Like, ed. Aelred Stubbs
C.R. (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1978), 48.
256
Ibid, 48.
257
Ibid, 48.
258
Ibid, 52.
259
Ibid, 52.
260
Ibid, 52.
72 all oppressed groups, blacks, were wholly committed to the struggle toward having
“the black man assuming his rightful place at the helm of the South African ship.”261
Blacks united in solidarity against apartheid could work to address and correct
the defamation of their character, humanity and history within South African culture.
Earlier in this chapter, blacks under the care of the DRC were instructed to internalize
their oppression. Black Consciousness saw this as a “distrust of themselves” and a
“continued dependence on” whites.
262
According to the leaders of Black
Consciousness, such as Steve Biko, this mental state is the ultimate embodiment of
self-hate.263 The defamation of non-white identity, culture, and history was the result
of the colonial history of indoctrination and inferiority propagated by the apartheid
government and the Dutch Reformed Church.
In 1971, SASO members met to discuss the organization’s official opinion on
Black Theology in South Africa. The Resolution criticized the problematic nature of
“Christianity as propagated by the white dominant churches [, which] has proved
beyond doubt to be a support for the status quo…[of] oppression.”264 The General
Student Council decided that Black Theology was “an authentic and positive
articulation of” the “existential situations” that arose from being black under
apartheid.265 While Black Consciousness was concerned with these very matters,
Black Theology “assert[ed] its validity and [saw] its existence in the context of the
261
Steve Biko, “Black Consciousness and The Quest for a True Humanity,” in I Write What I Like, ed.
Aelred Stubbs C.R. (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1978), 88.
262
“SASO Resolution on Black Theology, 1971,” accessed March 21, 2015.
http://www.blackpast.org/saso-resolution-black-theology-1971.
263
Steve Biko, “Black Consciousness and the Quest for a True Humanity,” in The Challenge of Black
Theology in South Africa, ed. Basil Moore (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1973), 41.
264
“SASO Resolution on Black Theology, 1971,” accessed March 21, 2015.
http://www.blackpast.org/saso-resolution-black-theology-1971.
265
“SASO Resolution on Black Theology, 1971,” accessed March 21, 2015.
http://www.blackpast.org/saso-resolution-black-theology-1971.
73 words of Christ,” and therefore operated in a distinctly socio-religious sphere.266
Black Theology, in so much as it was a full examination of the reality of blacks under
apartheid, was the force by which Christianity would be transformed to suit the
emancipatory agenda of the Black Consciousness Movement.
Reconfiguring Blackness
Among South African Black Theologians, the best-known American Black
Theologian is James Cone. A member of the faculty at the Union Theological
Seminary in New York, Cone is a theologian whose work is most notable for its
relating systematic theology with the American Black Power Movement. Cone is
probably the first person to use the term “Black Theology” in his 1969 opus, Black
Theology and Black Power. For Cone and other Black Theologians in the United
States and in South Africa, Black Theology is a conceptual framework that
reconsiders and revises biblical interpretation with a lens that empowers and liberates
blacks.
According to Cone, the gospel had failed over the course of the preceding
centuries to be relevant to the existence of oppressed blacks. In fact, the gospel
message, along with the rest of the Bible, had been distorted by the “white religious
establishment[s],” in order to exploit and humiliate blacks.267 At worst, theologians
were directly responsible for this exploitation insofar as they reaffirmed diabolical
associations of blackness. And at best, theologians were implicitly responsible
because they accepted the repressive conditions under which blacks lived, and
266
“SASO Resolution on Black Theology, 1971,” accessed March 21, 2015.
http://www.blackpast.org/saso-resolution-black-theology-1971.
267
James H. Cone, Black Theology and Black Power (New York: The Seabury Press, 1969), 2.
74 remained silent, instead concerned with passing “innocuously pious resolutions”,
waiting “to be congratulated.” 268 This kind of theological work was no longer
acceptable to Cone. Therefore, he proposed a theology that would stem directly from,
and therefore be relevant to, the black experience. In doing this, the Christian
message of salvation is self-determination for blacks, or, Black Power.269
At one of the first seminars of Black Theology in South Africa, which were
held at various Fellowship centers across the country in 1971, attendees listened to
papers given by South African clergy, as well as a tape-recording of Cone on “Black
Theology and Black Liberation.”270 The University Christian Movement (UCM), a
multi-racial group led by white Methodist clergyman Basil Moore and Catholic
activist Mogkethi Mothlabi, organized the conference.271 Moore and Anglican priest
Sabelo Ntswasa compiled and edited the papers given at the conference and published
them in a volume titled Essays in Black Theology (1972).272 The book, banned by the
apartheid government, was also published in the United States and in the United
Kingdom under the title, The Challenge of Black Theology in South Africa.
This volume courageously tackles the existential problem of being black and
Christian under apartheid. Inasmuch as Black Theology attempts to make sense of
black life under white rule, Lutheran minister Manas Buthelezi describes it as a
268
James H. Cone, Black Theology and Black Power (New York: The Seabury Press, 1969), 72.
James H. Cone, Black Theology and Black Power (New York: The Seabury Press, 1969), 38.
270
David J. Bosch, “Currents and Crosscurrents in South African Black Theology,” in Journal of
Religion in Africa, Vol. 6, Fasc. 1: 1974, accessed April 21st, 2014,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/1594925, 5-6.
271
Daniel Magaziner, The Law and the Prophets: Black Consciousness in South Africa, 1968-1977
(Athens: University of Ohio Press, 2010), accessed March 13th, 2015.
http://site.ebrary.com/lib/wesleyan/reader.action?docID=10430959&ppg=8, 10.
272
Moore, Basil and Ntwasa, Sabelo. Essays on Black Theology. Johannesburg: University Christian
Movement, 1972.
269
75 matter of “methodological technique.” 273 The method is a re-evaluation and reinterpretation of the Bible, which serves the purpose of affirming black dignity. Black
Theological praxis is an approach that prioritizes the multifaceted nature of black
oppression. This oppression is the point of departure for biblical hermeneutics in
Black Theology. Its goal is the empowerment of blacks and the full realization of
their human potential, which it encourages through critiques and reinterpretations of
God, Christ, and black humanity.
De/Re-Constructing God the Father
The official church doctrine concerning the Trinity, or three persons, within a
single Godhead was established during the Council of Nicea (325 C.E.).274 Since
then, Christian authors have insisted on the absolute unity of God, but also affirm that
God is self-differentiated, and that this internal differentiation reveals itself in three
different functions: God works in the world as “creator and lawgiver”, as redeeming
savior, and as sanctifying spirit. These persons are the Father, the Son, and the Holy
Spirit, respectively.275
As feminist theologians have long argued, the person of “God the Father”
presents us with a gendered image of God. Artistic representations of God almost
always depict a male figure or voice. 276 Catholic theologian Rosemary Radford
Ruether notes that God “is modeled after the patriarchal ruling class and is seen as
273
Manas Buthelezi, “Toward Indigenous Theology in South Africa,” in Third World Liberation
Theologies: A Reader, ed. Deane William Ferm (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1986), 220.
274
Alister E. McGrath, Historical Theology: An Introduction to the History of Christian Thought
(Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998), 33.
275
Alister E. McGrath, Historical Theology: An Introduction to the History of Christian Thought
(Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998), 65.
276
Sabelo Ntwasa and Basil Moore, “The Concept of God in Black Theology,” in The Challenge of
Black Theology in South Africa, ed. Basil Moore (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1973), 21.
76 addressing this class of males directly.”277 For example, in the biblical story of the
flood, God only speaks directly to Noah, and addresses his wife and the wives of
Noah’s sons twice, and never by name.278 The biblical tradition therefore sets up a
symbolic hierarchy by which women are “symbolically repressed as the dependent
servant class” because “they are referred to indirectly through their duties and
property relations to the patriarch.”279 This gendered image of God reflects the image
of a man, rather than a woman, and therefore contributes to misogyny in the Christian
tradition.
Layered over this gendered image, the image of God the Father as been
traditionally racialized as white.280 According to Ntwasa and Moore, God’s whiteness
had been circulating in South Africa since “the strange white man arrived on [their]
soil with his strange new God,” and condemned all African traditions and cultures.281
African converts were therefore made to understand their faith in terms of white
culture, as explained in Chapter II. Additionally, Western theology and art have
constantly illustrated God as white. According to DRC doctrine discussed previously,
blacks were made to think of themselves as ontologically subordinate to the chosen
Afrikaner nation. This racialized image of God therefore carries out the ideological
oppression of blacks in Christianity.
277
Rosemary Radford Ruether, “Sexism and God-Language,” in Weaving the Visions: New Patterns in
Feminist Spirtuality, ed. Judith Plaskow and Carol P. Christ (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989),
151.
278
Genesis 6-9 (Revised Standard Version).
279
Rosemary Radford Ruether, “Sexism and God-Language,” in Weaving the Visions: New Patterns in
Feminist Spirtuality, ed. Judith Plaskow and Carol P. Christ (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989),
151.
280
Sabelo Ntwasa and Basil Moore, “The Concept of God in Black Theology,” in The Challenge of
Black Theology in South Africa, ed. Basil Moore (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1973), 21.
281
Sabelo Ntwasa and Basil Moore, “The Concept of God in Black Theology,” in The Challenge of
Black Theology in South Africa, ed. Basil Moore (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1973), 20.
77 Black Theology claims that the image of God the Father had taken on the
image of a white, authoritative male who violently punished wrongdoers or the
unchosen.282 In Chapter I, we encountered the biblical story of God sending a flood to
destroy all of earth’s inhabitants. Only one family was chosen to survive this
traumatic destruction. God is aware of all the sins and wrongdoings on earth.
However, rather than reforming the sinful population on earth, he uses his power to
destroy everything. God is therefore depicted as an omniscient and violently
omnipotent character. These qualities as explained to Africans by white missionaries
served to give blacks “the inescapable impression of [God as] a super-human
tyrant.”283 The authoritative characteristic of God is the most damaging to blacks, as
this figure exists “‘over’, or ‘beyond’” blacks, and serves to reinforce the ideology of
their oppression.
Black Theology attempts to reinterpret the actions of God over the course of
biblical history. This re-evaluation is necessary in order to reaffirm black humanity
within the Christian tradition. In Black and Reformed, Coloured clergyman of the
Dutch Reformed Mission Church Allan Boesak claims that “God’s righteousness is
manifested in liberative deeds.”284 For example, the Bible tells of a period in the
Israelites’ history in which they were enslaved by Egypt. The Egyptian Pharaoh
refuses God’s command to free the Israelites, and is consequently sent ten plagues.285
Black Theologians, like Boesak, regard the Exodus story as God’s preference for the
282
Sabelo Ntwasa and Basil Moore, “The Concept of God in Black Theology,” in The Challenge of
Black Theology in South Africa, ed. Basil Moore (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1973), 20.
283
Sabelo Ntwasa and Basil Moore, “The Concept of God in Black Theology,” in The Challenge of
Black Theology in South Africa, ed. Basil Moore (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1973), 21.
284
Allan Boesak, “Holding on to the Vision,” in, Black and Reformed: Apartheid, Liberation and the
Calvinist Tradition, ed. Leonard Sweetman (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1984), 8.
285
Exodus 7-14 (Revised Standard Edition).
78 poor and unfree. According to Cone, “Israel’s identity as a people was grounded in
[God’s] liberating activity in Exodus.”286
Aside from the gospel, the Exodus narrative is the most concrete story of
physical and political liberation in the Bible. In using the Exodus narrative, black
South Africans claimed the place and identity of the Israelites. The people of Israel
and black South Africans are both socially subjugated and economically exploited by
a foreign political system. The Israelites are, however, enslaved outside their native
land, while the black South African is subjugated by a foreign power in their native
land. In the story of Exodus as told by South African Black Theology, “God heard
their cry and liberated them from slavery, from meaningless[ness] and alienation, to
the fulfillment of their humanity in service of the living God”.287 According to Allan
Boesak, “The name by which God reveals himself is YHWH—the One who is
Active, who is and is present, who will free his people.”288 Thus, the Exodus narrative
reveals to twentieth century Christians that God’s will is historically bound in a
liberation of those in “the condition of oppression and poverty”.289 The Israelites, who
are conscious of the nature of their enslaved condition, fit Biko’s definition of black,
thereby forging a historical and divine connection between Israel and (an imagined)
post-apartheid South Africa. The Exodus narrative is hinged on the direct action of
God, especially through one political figure, a Moses persona. Since Black Theology
in South Africa took on many themes from Black Consciousness, the agency of the
286
James Cone, “Black Theology and Black Liberation,” in The Challenge of Black Theology in South
Africa, ed. Basil Moore (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1973), 54.
287
Allan Boesak. Black and Reformed: Apartheid, Liberation, and the Calvinist Tradition (Orbis
Books: New York, 1984), 72.
288
Allan Boesak, A Farewell to Innocence (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1976), 17.
289
Ibid, 73.
79 divine from one “Moses” figure was moved onto every single black individual in
order to uplift blacks.
This contribution expands the emancipatory agenda of Black Theology in
regards to black humanity. God’s “complete transcendence over creaturely
existence,” affirms his divine freedom, according to Cone.290 Furthermore, “God’s
being as freedom… is also an affirmation of God’s freedom to be for us [, blacks,] in
the social context of human existence.”291 Julian Kunnie, a religious studies scholar
and activist, claims that the right to be free is based on the fact that God “created all
human beings in freedom and as destined to be free.”292 In short, humans were
created to be free because they were made in God’s (free) image. The Exodus
narrative is included under other Biblical narratives in order to highlight the morality
of the oppressed under the direction of God.
God’s transcendent freedom over humankind is one step in reaffirming black
humanity in Christianity. Every person’s humanity, bestowed upon us by God,
therefore lies deepest in the gospel message of salvation. Jesus Christ’s embodiment
of divinity and humanity demonstrate how humans should strive to exist in the
world.293 Just as God the Father must be reconfigured from colonial absolutist to
revolutionary liberator, so must Jesus’ identity and actions in the Bible be
reconstructed in order to expand the emancipatory agenda of Black Theology.
290
James H. Cone, “Freedom, History, and Hope,” in Liberation, Revolution, and Freedom:
Theological Perspectives, ed. Thomas M. McFadden (New York: The Seabury Press, 1975), 61.
291
James H. Cone, “Freedom, History, and Hope,” in Liberation, Revolution, and Freedom:
Theological Perspectives, ed. Thomas M. McFadden (New York: The Seabury Press, 1975), 60.
292
Julain Kunnie, “Christianity, Black Theology, and Liberating Faith,” in The Unquestionable Right
To Be Free: Black Theology from South Africa, ed. Itumeleng J. Mosala and Buti Tlhagale (Maryknoll:
Orbis Books, 1986), 158.
293
Allan Boesak, “The Courage to be Black,” in Black and Reformed: Apartheid, Liberation, and the
Calvinist Tradition, ed. Leonard Sweetman (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1984), 10.
80 Jesus Christ: The Black Messiah?
Along with a reconsideration of the personhood of God the Father, the project
of recovering black humanity also entails a re-evaluation of Jesus Christ’s human.
The life of Christ and the gospel message are of paramount importance in the
Christian tradition. However, as Manas Buthelezi notes, the message of salvation has
only ever been presented as the solution to the needs of the European.294 This has
been most recently been demonstrated in the position of the DRC in South Africa.
During the early 20th century in South Africa, the growing poor white population was
the impetus for this new philosophy of Afrikaner nationalism, apartheid. Christianity
operating under the colonial legacy sought to alleviate the situation of the poor whites
by claiming that “the suffering of the Afrikaner, accordingly, was the result of the sin
of admixture” between “civilized Christian nations
295
This crude language
underscores the fact that a racially defined ideology can only affirm the dignity of one
groups of people by stressing another’s inferiority.296 Additionally, the redeeming
salvific agenda of Jesus Christ, according to white theologians, emphasizes salvation
from sin, and not from oppression. Jesus is therefore exclusively concerned “men’s
motives and hearts,” and is not “a social reformer in any sense.”297
294
Manas Buthelezi, “Toward Indigenous Theology in South Africa,” in Third World Liberation
Theologies: A Reader, ed. Deane William Ferm (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1986), 206.
295
Johann Kinghorn, “The Theology of Separate Equality: A Critical outline of the DRC’s Position on
Apartheid,” in Christianity Amidst Apartheid, ed. Martin Prozesky (New York: St. Martin’s Press,
1990), 62.
296
Johann Kinghorn, “The Theology of Separate Equality: A Critical outline of the DRC’s Position on
Apartheid,” in Christianity Amidst Apartheid, ed. Martin Prozesky (New York: St. Martin’s Press,
1990), 62.
297
Alan Richardson, “Poor,” in A Theological Word Book of the Bible, ed. Alan Richardson (Londom:
SCM Press LTD, 1956), 169.
81 Jesus is therefore detached from the “strangling problems of oppression, fear,
hunger, insult and dehmanisation” that black South Africans face.298 In “What is
Black Theology?” Basil Moore wonders how a black ghetto congregation group in a
South African township would make sense of a white, middle-class minister’s
seminary image of Jesus of Nazareth.299 Moore wonders, “what meaning would ‘Son
of Man’, ‘Messiah’, [or] ‘Son of God,’” convey.300 Buthelezi calls this detachment
between Christ and blacks, a “hermeneutical gap,” meaning the existing
interpretations of Jesus’ life have very little relevance to a black South African’s
ontological problems. 301
Black Theology assigns importance to the aspects of Jesus’ life that would
resonate the most with oppressed South Africans. Black Theologians in South Africa
were not interested in Jesus’ skin color, per se. Rather, his status as a poor Jew living
in Roman-occupied Judea was “a meaningful symbol of God’s identification with the
oppressed,” and signified Christ as black.302 Boesak claims that this blackness of
Christ “has nothing to do with the physical appearance of God.” 303 Nor is it,
according to Moore, “a rush of hot religious emotionalism that has obscured
reason.” 304 Mokgethi Motlhabi, the acting director of UCM’s Black Theology
Project, claimed that blackness “denotes all the oppressed people in our country
298
Basil Moore, “What is Black Theology?” in The Challenge of Black Theology in South Africa, ed.
Basil Moore (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1973), 6.
299
Basil Moore, “What is Black Theology?” in The Challenge of Black Theology in South Africa, ed.
Basil Moore (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1973), 7.
300
Ibid, 7.
301
Manas Buthelezi, “Toward Indigenous Theology in South Africa,” in Third World Liberation
Theologies: A Reader, ed. Deane William Ferm (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1986), 206.
302
Basil Moore, “What is Black Theology?” in The Challenge of Black Theology in South Africa, ed.
Basil Moore (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1973), 8.
303
Allan Boesak, “The Courage to be Black,” in Black and Reformed: Apartheid, Liberation, and the
Calvinist Tradition, ed. Leonard Sweetman (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1984), 10.
304
Basil Moore, “What is Black Theology?” in The Challenge of Black Theology in South Africa, ed.
Basil Moore (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1973), 8.
82 irrespective of color (which cannot be white, of course), nationality, or creed”.305
Additionally, as we will remember from Steve Biko, blackness does not just refer to
one’s oppressed status; it is also one’s ability to cultivate insight about their reality.306
Jesus’ blackness therefore informs his message of salvation, and the message of
salvation affirms his blackness. Under the project of Black Theology, Jesus becomes
a political revolutionary against the imperial and capitalist forces of the occupying
Roman Empire—his agenda of salvation for humans therefore contains implications
for eternal souls of humans as well as their lived experiences on earth.
A re-evaluation of Jesus’ identity in order to give relevance to black South
Africans must be class-conscious. According to Allan Boesak, Jesus’ parents were so
poor that they were not able to bring the sacrifice prescribed by the Torah for his
circumcision, which was a year old lamb. Instead, they brought the sacrifice of the
poor: two turtledoves.”307 Jesus’ humble origins would go on to characterize his
revolutionary project of salvation.308 At one of Jesus’ most important speeches, the
Sermon on the Mount, Jesus blesses the oppressed and downtrodden of the earth, “for
theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”309 The kingdom of God was for the poor rather than
the rich “because the poor has nothing to expect from this world while the entire
305
Mokgethi Motlhabi, “Black Theology: A Personal View” in The Challenge of Black Theology in
South Africa, ed. Basil Moore (John Knox Press: Atlanta, 1973), 77.
306
Nyameko Pityana, “What is Black Consciousness?” in, The Challenge of Black Theology in South
Africa, ed. Basil Moore (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1973), 60.
307
Leviticus 12:6 and Luke 2: 22-23, quoted in Allan Boesak, “The Courage to be Black,” in Black
and Reformed: Apartheid, Liberation, and the Calvinist Tradition, ed. Leonard Sweetman (Maryknoll:
Orbis Books, 1984), 11.
308
Allan Boesak, “The Courage to be Black,” in Black and Reformed: Apartheid, Liberation, and the
Calvinist Tradition, ed. Leonard Sweetman (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1984), 11.
309
Matthew 5:3 (Revised Standard Edition).
83 existence of the rich is grounded in [their] commitment to worldly things.”310 The
oppressed were therefore always at the heart of Jesus’ message of salvation.
A reinterpretation of Jesus’ life that highlights his modest economic status and
his political status gives the image of a Jesus who is not unlike a black person living
in South Africa. Geopolitically, Jesus lived in the Judean province of the Roman
Empire. Neither Jesus nor any of his disciples would have been Roman citizens.311
Jews living in 1st century Israel at this time were a conquered people paying taxes to
and living under a colonial occupation.312 Jesus as a colonized individual living under
the alien legislation of an imperial power resonates with the reality of blacks, living in
homelands under apartheid. However, while Jesus was one of the economically
exploited and politically disenfranchised Jews under Roman occupation, he was also
a revolutionary liberator.313
According to Black South African liberation theolgians, Jesus critiqued the
Roman appointed political system in Judea as a part of his revolutionary
sociopolitical agenda of salvation. Boesak claims that to the Roman Empire, the Jews
“were without value except insofar as they were useful to the Romans and their
accomplices”.314 King Herod, the Roman appointed King of Judea, was one such
accomplice and well known for his mental illness and cruelty to his family and
310
James H. Cone, “Black Theology and Black Liberation,” in The Challenge of Black Theology in
South Africa, ed. Basil Moore (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1973), 55.
311
Basil Moore, “What is Black Theology?” in The Challenge of Black Theology in South Africa, ed.
Basil Moore (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1973), 8.
312
Basil Moore, “What is Black Theology?” in The Challenge of Black Theology in South Africa, ed.
Basil Moore (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1973), 7.
313
Allan Boesak, “Liberation and the Churches of Africa,” in Black and Reformed: Apartheid,
Liberation, and the Calvinist Tradition, ed. Leonard Sweetman (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1984), 73.
314
Allan Boesak, “The Courage to be Black,” in Black and Reformed: Apartheid, Liberation, and the
Calvinist Tradition, ed. Leonard Sweetman (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1984), 12.
84 subjects.315 According to Boesak, Jesus referred to Herod as a “fox,” as he was wellknown for supporting Roman decrees. 316 Jesus’ disapproval of the oppressive
political powers in Judea therefore indicate his support for revolutionaries against
unjust political systems today. In this sense, Black Theology reinterprets the gospel
message in order to attack the status quo as espoused by apartheid supporters, like the
DRC.
Jesus’ critique on the religious leaders of the Jewish community also reveals
his revolutionary agenda of salvation for Black Theology. In Matthew 23, Jesus
decries the Pharisees as “full of hypocrisy and iniquity.” 317 Jesus continuously
deprecated the religious leaders in Judea for being concerned with their outward
appearances insteaed of with the matters of “justice and mercy.”318 Christ’s critique
of the Pharisees mirrors Black Theology’s critique on the DRC and white Christian
liberals who refused to speak up and act out against oppression. Cone calls these
Christians and their churches enemies of Christ, because they refuse to take on
Christ’s liberatory agenda in the world.319
Black Theology critiqued white religious powers of the same crimes, as blacks
were made to think of themselves as ontologically subordinate to whites, in
accordance with apartheid ideology. This particular reading of the person and gospel
of Christ empowered blacks by claiming that Jesus’ life was far more alike black
realities under apartheid than they were led to believe. Accordingly, Cone says, “If
315
Solomon Zeitlin, “Herod: A Malevolent Maniac,” in The Jewish Quarterly Review, Vol. 54, No. 1
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/1453457.pdf, 1-27.
316
Allan Boesak, “The Courage to be Black,” in Black and Reformed: Apartheid, Liberation, and the
Calvinist Tradition, ed. Leonard Sweetman (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1984), 13.
317
Matthew 23:28 (Revised Standard Edition).
318
Matthew 23:23 (Revised Standard Edition).
319
James H. Cone, Black Theology and Black Power (New York: The Seabury Press, 1969), 73.
85 Jesus Christ is in fact the Liberator whose resurrection is the guarantee that he is
present with us today, then he too must be black, taking upon his person and work the
blackness of our existence.”320
A re-evaluation of Jesus’ life through a Black Theological lens then serves to
demonstrate that blacks could form a religious protest against apartheid in order to
reassert their humanity and dignity. If the life of the resurrected Christ could reveal
meaning in the lives repressed black South Africans—“The conflict was not theirs but
the Lord’s, the stakes were not political but divine,” and were therefore predestined
for victory.321 According to black feminist-womanist theologian Delores Williams,
one can only gain knowledge and therefore true salvation of Jesus by joining the
liberation struggle of the oppressed.322 This sort of reading of the gospel message of
salvation therefore creates a socio-ethical praxis for the way Christianity is practiced
by black South Africans.
Engaging in Black Theological Praxis
Black Theology is a critical reflection of the word of God with regards to the
lives of South African blacks. Christians are called to engage with the will of God,
expressed in this chapter as liberation from oppressive sociopolitical forces.
Therefore, the socio-ethical nature of Black Theology makes the claim that liberation
from oppression means the empowerment of black people. In South Africa, this is
320
James H. Cone, “Black Theology and Black Liberation,” in The Challenge of Black Theology in
South Africa, ed. Basil Moore (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1973), 56.
321
Rupe Simms, “Black Theology, A Weapon in the Struggle for Freedom: A Gramscian Analysis,” in
Race and Society, Vol. 2, No. 2. 190,167.
322
Delores S. Williams, “James Cone’s Liberation: Twenty Years Later,” in A Black Theology of
Liberation, Twentieth Anniversary Edition, ed. James H. Cone (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1990), 193.
86 crucial, since the black majority was systematically oppressed in order to socially
elevate whites. This section is concerned with the ways in which engaging in this
socio-ethical theology brings about a sincere black humanity. We will therefore
discuss the Black Theology’s critical understanding of mental oppression, absolutism,
and corporate personality.
In South Africa, the political system of apartheid worked with the DRC in
order to circumscribe the lives of blacks in such a way as to make oppression seem
natural. While the institution of apartheid had a lasting and devastating influence,
blackness, as we have already discussed, came to South Africa rife with the most
crudely negative associations. Boesak notes that it is no wonder that blacks learned to
hate themselves and each other as a result of the ancient and systematic indoctrination
of their inferior status. 323 In “Black Consciousness and the Quest for a True
Humanity,” Biko noted that the “most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is
the mind of the oppressed.”324 He believed that if the minds of black South Africans
were totally “manipulated and controlled,” as was the goal under apartheid, there
would be no way to escape subordination by whites.325 According to Buthelezi, the
definition of a colonized mind is the “state of existence in which the selfhood is
crushed by external factors and circumstances or is subject to pressure from outside to
direct itself in such a way as to serve interests other than those of self.” 326
Furthermore, the most extreme example is in the mental condition of a slave, who is
323
Allan Boesak, “The Courage to be Black,” in Black and Reformed: Apartheid, Liberation, and the
Calvinist Tradition, ed. Leonard Sweetman (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1984), 10.
324
Steve Biko, “Black Consciousness and the Quest for a True Humanity,” in The Challenge of Black
Theology in South Africa, ed. Basil Moore (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1973), 41.
325
Steve Biko, “Black Consciousness and the Quest for a True Humanity,” in The Challenge of Black
Theology in South Africa, edited by Basil Moore (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1973), 41.
326
Manas Buthelezi, “Theological Grounds for an Ethic of Hope,” in The Challenge of Black Theology
in South Africa, ed. Basil Moore (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1973), 151.
87 stripped of humanity and completely exploited to serve the needs of his/her master.327
The condition of mental colonialization therefore needed be abolished in order to
destabilize the ideological grip of apartheid and cultivate a sincere black humanity in
South Africa.
The abrogation of the colonized mind in South Africa entails a complete
rejection of the domination of whites over blacks. This involves rejecting the white
liberal tendency to guide and lead blacks against oppression.328 The reasoning behind
this rejection is, according to Biko, because white liberals seem to be interested in
determining the method for resistance and leading blacks against oppression, even
when these liberal whites have benefitted and operated within these very systems of
oppression.329 A cultivation of a true black humanity cannot happen when whites lead
the opposition against injustice. Rather, there must be “a strong solidarity amongst the
blacks,” in order for the project of liberation to be truly empowering.330 According to
Biko, “the limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they
oppress,” which is why blacks “must reject the beggar tactics” forced on them by
white liberals.331 This rejection allows for the development and enrichment of black
leadership against oppression. Additionally, the development of a black leadership
demonstrates the ability to self-govern to the entire black community. This
strengthens black solidarity and contributes to an authentic black empowerment.
327
Manas Buthelezi, “Theological Grounds for an Ethic of Hope,” in The Challenge of Black Theology
in South Africa, ed. Basil Moore (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1973), 151.
328
Steve Biko, “Black Consciousness and the Quest for a True Humanity,” in The Challenge of Black
Theology in South Africa, ed. Basil Moore (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1973), 38.
329
Steve Biko, “Black Consciousness and the Quest for a True Humanity,” in The Challenge of Black
Theology in South Africa, ed. Basil Moore (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1973), 38.
330
Ibid, 39.
331
Ibid, 39.
88 A true black humanity must be concerned with creating opportunities of
leadership and power for blacks. Earlier in this chapter, the image of God the Father
as an authoritative white male is deconstructed in order to develop a more holistic
person of God. According to Black Theologians, the image of God the Father as an
absolutist white male gives the impression of an unforgiving tyrant, unconcerned with
the Black Theological agenda of liberation. If the image of God is to undergo
rehabilitation in order to suit the emancipatory agenda of Black Theology, then the
method of black organization against oppression must also be held to that standard.
The project of uncovering and reaffirming black humanity requires a coalition
of blacks to support black liberation in South Africa. Firstly, it needs to be said that
the true meaning of black liberation in South Africa means that the black majority is
in power. In accordance with a democratic rule, which Black Theology supported, the
black majority would then exercise power in South African politics as a result of their
population’s majority. The implementation of black power with regards to the
reconstruction of God means that blacks “have to be on guard in [their] own
structures and organisations [so] that we don’t become authoritarian,” according to
Motlhabi.332 If blacks can envision a post-apartheid era where racism is rejected but
the authoritative nature of politics is unchanged, then a Black Theology, a theology of
the oppressed, will still be necessary.333
Engaging in Black Theological praxis and abolishing the systems of
oppression and authoritarianism rest on the active and community based
332
Mokgethi Motlhabi, “Black Theology and Authority,” in The Challenge of Black Theology in South
Africa, ed. Basil Moore (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1973), 127.
333
Mokgethi Motlhabi, “Black Theology and Authority,” in The Challenge of Black Theology in South
Africa, ed. Basil Moore (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1973), 123.
89 understanding of one’s humanity in direct relationship to others. As Motlhabi notes,
“human relations depend on at least two human beings who are trying to work out the
character of their relationship.” 334 Sabelo Ntwasa claims that Black Theological
praxis “is a unity in total commitment to each other in a corporate life ‘in Christ.’”335
English Theologian H. Wheeler Robinson coined the term “corporate personality” in
order to demonstrate the ancient Hebrew tendencies to inextricably associate one
individual with their extended kingroup. According to Wheeler Robinson, “the whole
group…might function as a single individual,” because every individual was
considered representative of the entire group.336 Black Theologian Boganjalo Goba
uses H. Wheeler Robinson’s concept of corporate personality defined as the
“embodiment of the community in the individual.” 337 The concept of corporate
personality is a useful way to gain insight into how black solidarity leads to the
affirmation and assertion of black humanity. According to this logic expressed by
Goba and influenced by Wheeler, when the individual is committed as an agent of
social change, they necessarily express the interests of the black community.338 The
idea of corporate personality in a black community allows for an exploration of black
humanity because it prioritizes the needs of the entire community. The humanity of
the entire community, asserted on the level of the individual, will then permeate the
life of each community member. This is the socio-ethical practice of Black Theology
334
Mokgethi Motlhabi, “Black Theology and Authority,” in The Challenge of Black Theology in South
Africa, ed. Basil Moore (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1973), 122.
335
Sabelo Ntwasa, “The Concept of the Church in Black Theology,” in The Challenge of Black
Theology, ed. Basil Moore (Atlanta: John Knox Press: 1973), 117.
336
H. Wheeler Robinson, Corporate Personality in Ancient Israel (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1980),
25.
337
Boganjalo Goba, “Corporate Personality: Ancient Israel and Africa,” in The Challenge of Black
Theology in South Africa, ed. Basil Moore (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1973), 65.
338
Boganjalo Goba, “Corporate Personality: Ancient Israel and Africa,” in The Challenge of Black
Theology in South Africa, ed. Basil Moore (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1973), 69.
90 with regards to black humanity—the needs of the black community, namely
freedom—are prioritized in the social agenda of each individual.
The full realization of black humanity within the Black Theological project
can therefore be understood as a project of clarifying and reasserting the humanity of
blacks under oppressive structures. While Black Theology has not been limited to just
South Africa, as evidenced by the work of James Cone (and other American Black
Theologians not mentioned in this chapter), the nature of apartheid within the context
of an indigenous, black majority involves unique issues, such as the displacement of
Africans from their native lands, on such lands, by a foreign power. The end of
apartheid in 1994 unfortunately did not drastically change the quality of black life for
the better. To date, the land reform process in South Africa has been unsuccessful: in
the post-apartheid era, blacks have received a re-distribution of less than 7% of the
land.339 The problem of land reform is just one small issue that faces black South
Africans and the democratic government, 20 years after the dismantling of apartheid.
The system of apartheid was only decades long, but segregation period before, and
the slave trade of the early colonial period contributed vastly to the dehumanization
of blacks. For this reason, the project of Black Theology has still not been completed.
Black Theology has, however, expanded the language and methods of organization
by which blacks can continue to endeavor to an authentic existence in the world.
339
Edward Lahiff, “Land Reform in South Africa: Is It Meeting the Challenge?” The Programme for
Land and Agrarian Studies, accessed April 8th, 2015. http://povtc.pbs.org/pov/docs/promisedland/promisedland_landreform.pdf
91 Conclusion
On Saturday, April 4th, 2015, a police officer stopped 50-year-old Walter
Scott in North Charleston, South Carolina, for a broken taillight. Not an hour later,
Scott was dead; three shots to the back, one to his upper buttocks, and one to his ear.
Walter Scott remained hand cuffed for the last minutes of his life, pronounced dead
by paramedics at the scene.340
On Tuesday, April 7th, 2015 Officer Michael T. Slager, was arrested and
charged with murder only after a video of the event surfaced, indicating falsities in
the filed police report. While the details of this case are currently unclear, what is
clear is that being black in America today is a crime within itself. Slager’s arrest is an
exception to the rule; (white) police officers are rarely held accountable for their use
of deadly force against unarmed black civilians. If the events of the past year are any
indication, Slager will not be indicted for charges of first-degree murder.
The project of this thesis was spurred by an interest in the use of Christian
thought and language to combat apartheid in South Africa, one of the most singular
methods of social organization within the context of modern nation-states.
Throughout this thesis, we encounter white-dominated discourses, which ascribe
varying degrees of meaning to blackness and black bodies. Simultaneously, we
encounter theological retaliation by these individuals and communities that were
commodified and dehumanized by the white-dominated discourses. While both the
oppressor and the oppressed used Christianity in their agendas of subjugation and
340
Michael S. Schmidt and Matt Apuzzo, “South Carolina Officer is Charged with Murder of Walter
Scott,” New York Times, April 7th, 2015, accessed April 8th, 2015.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/08/us/south-carolina-officer-is-charged-with-murder-in-black-mansdeath.html.
92 liberation, respectively, we must remember that the project of liberation does not
mean the subjugation of the old oppressor. It means the empowerment of the
oppressed in order to explore past identities, configure present ones, and explore
options for a more positive view of the self.
Inasmuch as we have explored the processes of indigenization and
reaffirmation of black humanity, we might ask ourselves—why do we have to say,
“Black lives matter!” The answer to this lies in refusal of a grand jury to indict a
police officer Darren Wilson for the murder of an unarmed teenager, Michael Brown,
a modern day embodiment of these ancient and medieval conceptions of blackness in
Chapter I. The existing state of affairs has indicated that black bodies are still not
given the same protections as non-black bodies, which demonstrates the deep-rooted
notions held by patristic, medieval, early modern authors, and the colonial legacy at
large.
This thesis has sought to contribute to a narrative that has been systematically
silenced by the institutional powers of the world. As an addition to this narrative of
reaffirming black dignity, this work acknowledges that black bodies have been forced
to and are remained forced to validate their existence when others are not expected to
do the same, namely, whites. However, verbal tradition lies an opportunity for black
people recode the discourse surrounding their existence—and therefore create a
reconfigured blackness that might be vital to their future identity.
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